WashPost fact checker exposed as partisan liar whose 'fact checks' are subjective spin

Sunday, January 03, 2016 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: Washington Post, fact checker, leftist propaganda

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(NaturalNews) The editor of The Washington Post's fact-check division has finally confessed that the paper's methodology for vetting the truthfulness of a politician's statements isn't exactly honest or objective.

After repeatedly denying that he takes a partisan approach, Glenn Kessler now says that his popular "Pinocchio" rating system is "inherently... subjective" and "not based on... pieces of fact," confirming what many have long claimed about its alleged objectivity.

The straw that broke the camel's back was a recent criticism levied by Kessler against Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina. Kessler had awarded Fiorina three Pinocchios for claiming that she went from being a secretary to a CEO – a claim that, according to Breitbart, is technically true.

Though Kessler affirms that this and another claim made by Fiorina are true independently of one another, he takes issue with the overall message they convey to voters together – that Fiorina's "secretary to CEO" claim represents some kind of "rags to riches" miracle, when this isn't exactly the case.

For this, Kessler awarded Fiorina three Pinocchios in a fact-check column, which if you remember the iconic Disney character's role in the film, is supposed to indicate that Fiorina isn't really telling the truth.

"We examined the claim and the message it represents to the average voter — not based on two separate pieces of fact," wrote Kessler in a response to criticisms about his three-Pinocchio rating for Fiorina.

"In this case, Fiorina presents her 'secretary to CEO' story as a uniquely American one, emblematic of the American dream, and leaves the impression that she worked her way up to the latter from the bottom rungs of an industry."

'Right' vs. 'Left' is a sham, so why not expose them all equally?

None of this would be all that controversial if Kessler had applied this same methodology to his awarding of Pinocchios for Democrat politicians like Barack Obama, who in 2012 lied about his mother's battle with cancer.

Obama had claimed in a campaign video that his mother had to fight with insurance companies to attain coverage for her cancer treatments, which later proved to be patently false. But for this major political lie, Obama received the same number of Pinocchios from Kessler – three.

The disparity between how Kessler handles political lies from the right versus the left has finally caught up with him, and the cat is out of the bag. Kessler now admits that his Pinocchio rating system is inherently biased, which represents yet another strike against the failing news outlet for which he works.

"Kessler's lengthy rationalization is essentially a confession that finally proves what many of us have been saying for years: that Kessler and the Post have been abusing the imprimatur of fact-checking as a partisan weapon to push a left-leaning agenda," wrote John Nolte for Breitbart.

"Opinion editorials written by Kessler and his colleagues are treated as 'fact checks,' which makes them potent weapons against the Republican Party."

This isn't to say that the political right is somehow less corrupt than the political left – both act as two sides of the same coin, which we've documented extensively over the years. But the slanting of truth by "fact-checkers" like Kessler only adds fuel to the fires of deceit, making it even more difficult to dissect fact from fiction.

"Kessler would make for a fine left-wing columnist," Nolte added. "As a fact checker, though, he is a documented partisan, and now by his own admission we know that his fact check column doesn't let facts get in the way of his 'subjective' opinion."

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

WashingtonPost.com