It was a telling revelation from now-former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler when he shared a conversation he once had with publisher Will Lewis, in which Lewis asked the following: 

“What should the Post do to appeal more to Fox News viewers?”

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“[I felt he] was crossing a bit of a business-newsroom line where he was asking my advice on how to make the newspaper appeal to different audience,” Kessler shared. “As I write in the piece, frankly, the audience of the Washington Post is mostly liberal. I mean, this is based on my anecdotal evidence based on if I wrote fact checks that gave Pinocchios to Democrats, I got lots of angry emails. If I gave fact checks that gave Pinocchios to Republicans, I didn’t get that many emails. And so it was an indication of where his thinking was.”

“And as I said, it would be a good idea to broaden the readership base of the Washington Post to bring in more conservatives,” he continued. “But the question is, how do you do that without losing your liberal readers?”

So, because of angry emails from the Left, the Washington Post and, by extension, Kessler tried to quell said anger with stories targeting the Right, appeasing the Left, and fact-checks that would keep the email inbox silent. 

Democracy dies in darkness, indeed.

And it’s not just limited to the Washington Post but to other fact-check organizations as well. Take Politifact. The site was launched 18 years ago by former Tampa Bay Times Washington Bureau Chief Bill Aidar. Politifact won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the 2008 election, although finding fact-checks of Democrats and particularly former President Barack Obama is difficult, while there’s a treasure trove of checks against Republicans. 

A 2011 study by the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics showed that Republicans were three times more likely to be fact-checked by Politifact than Democrats. It also assigned “Pants on Fire” ratings to 39% of Republican statements, while Democrats only received the same analysis just 12% of the time. 

“In total, 74 of the 98 statements by political figures judged ‘false’ or ‘pants on fire’ over the last 13 months were given to Republicans, or 76 percent, compared to just 22 statements for Democrats (22 percent),” it also reports. 

During the Biden administration, the bias of omission was even more pronounced. Former President Joe Biden’s first press secretary, Jen Psaki, told some real whoppers during her time at the podium in the James S. Brady Briefing Room:

– Republicans “are the ones who want to defund law enforcement.”

– The border is “closed.”

– The crisis at the border is Trump’s fault because he left a “dismantled system.”

– Rising inflation is “transitory.” 

– Rising inflation is actually “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s price hike.”

– The Afghanistan withdrawal “can’t be called “anything but a success.”

– Biden takes questions “nearly every day from the press.”  

We could go on, but there’s finite space here. So with all of the lies to choose from above, how many fact-checks did Pskai receive for any of them?

Zero. 

And overall, how many did she receive during her two-plus years as White House press secretary? 

Two. And this one was rated true, no questions asked:

“You are 17 times more likely to go to the hospital if you’re not vaccinated [for COVID-19] and 20 times more likely to die.”

Compare this with President Donald Trump’s third White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who received five times more fact-checks (10) than Psaki. Of those 10, seven were rated false, including this one from a comment she made as a host of Outnumbered on Fox News. The conclusion defies logic:

McEnany: “Joe Biden’s wide-open southern border is to blame for fentanyl deaths in the U.S.” 

Politifact: False! 

The piece also goes on to say, “There have been 4.5 million encounters with migrants at the southern border between February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, and December 2022. But McEnany is wrong to suggest that’s because the border has been ‘wide open’ since he took office.” 

How again is she wrong in saying that?  

Psaki’s successor, Karine Jean-Pierre, got similar treatment under Biden. Snopes, another fact-checking organization, fact-checked her just five times despite telling as many whoppers as Psaki. Jean-Pierre, for example, pushed the “cheap fake” videos hoax that some reporters actually brought into regarding video and audio clearly showing Biden’s mental decline. 

Overall, Snopes sided with Jean-Pierre on four of the five “fact-checks” while ignoring statements at the time, such as when she said Biden didn’t lie after promising not to pardon his son Hunter Biden, which he did. 

We also saw during the 2024 campaign that the broadcast networks are hopelessly biased when it comes to fact-checking. The prime example came during the presidential debate on ABC between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris, when Trump claimed that crime had skyrocketed under Biden-Harris. “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” Muir piously corrected Trump. 

But (after the debate, of course), the FBI updated its report. After reporting a 2.1% decrease in violent crimes in 2022, the FBI amended the number to show there was actually a 4.5% increase.

“According to crime and data expert John Lott, the new numbers reflect a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 over 2021,” reported Fox News at the time. “He found that under the umbrella of violent crime, there were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults that year.”

And when the FBI released the accurate stats after the fact, ABC and Muir didn’t acknowledge it or apologize.

Overall, that night, Trump was fact-checked five times and was asked six follow-up questions. Harris? Zero fact-checks and zero follow-ups, despite claiming…

1) There were no U.S. military personnel in active war zones. At the time, the United States had 900 U.S. military personnel in Syria, with another 2,500 troops in Iraq. We had personnel killed in the Red Sea this year alone from drone strikes by Iranian-backed proxies. 

No fact-check from ABC. 

2 & 3) Kamala also claimed Trump supports a national ban on abortion (lie) and in vitro fertilization (lie). 

No fact-check. 

4) She insisted that Trump left us with the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. Not even close. 

No fact-check. 

Fortunately, the tide is turning in the Trump 2.0 era. Kessler just took a buyout at the Washington Post, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that the social media giant will eliminate fact-checkers. 

“The fact checkers have just been too politically biased, and they’ve destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” said Zuckerberg in a video statement. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

Zuckerberg has since moved to a community notes model, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk’s X. This can’t be seen as anything but positive after how each company conducted itself, pre-Musk, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, which included locking out accounts of anyone who shared the New York Post’s exclusive on the damning contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, or claimed that COVID-19 may have come from a lab that literally studies coronaviruses in Wuhan. 

Fact-checking was once a noble profession. It served as the last bastion of gatekeepers in a world where politicians and the media that cover them are at an all-time low in trust. 

A LAST WASHINGTON POST FACT CHECK: TRUMP LIES, MAGA ARE LEMMINGS

The problem was… the fact-checkers need fact-checkers themselves. Perhaps it’s because of what Kessler described as an angry mob seeking confirmation bias. Or perhaps enough is finally enough. 

Good riddance.