The former “fact-checker” for the liberal Washington Post has departed with both barrels blazing, one at President Donald Trump and his “followers,” and the other at his ex-employer, where he dished “Pinocchios” for years.
In an exit interview, Glenn Kessler blamed Trump and social media for the rise of “falsehoods” and ripped the president’s supporters, potentially half the nation, for lapping up his “alternative” facts.
Asked by the Columbia Journalism Review why he believes “falsehoods are winning,” Kessler said, “I attribute it to the rise of Donald Trump, combined with the rise of social media. Trump has made it acceptable to lie with impunity. He creates his own reality, his own world, composed of alternative facts. And his followers fall right in line, and their news organizations echo all of that.”
Kessler, who took a Washington Post buyout offer after 27 years with the newspaper, cited Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner as the latest example of the president rejecting facts after the agency offered a stunning revision of past job creation numbers.
“That’s living in your own alternative reality. Presidents, for decades, have never questioned the numbers produced by the government workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I mean, there were bad numbers — they said, ‘Okay, we’ve got to work harder.’ And Trump is just going to say, ‘No, the numbers are great. It’s just that these people are manipulating them.’ That’s a very dangerous situation for this country to be in,” he said.
The Washington Post has never been a fan of Trump since he made politics his career. Its promotion of the Russia collusion hoax, cheerleading for two impeachments of the president during his first term, and other anti-Trump campaigns have driven conservative readers away.
Kessler, who plans to write books and has started a Substack column, had one of the more popular columns on the Washington Post site and was eager to find a replacement after deciding to take the lucrative buyout that several other prominent reporters and editors also took.
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But he indicated that the paper wasn’t interested. He said that there has been a move away from fact-checking by the high-tech moguls who fund it, even naming Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.
He told CJR that after bankrolling fact-checking, Zuckerberg stopped, and he blamed Trump. “But then, in order to curry favor from Trump — who doesn’t like fact-checks and doesn’t like the idea that social media platforms are actually rooting out false information — Zuckerberg decided to stop the funding for fact-checkers in the United States, and is probably going to roll it back across the world, [though that may be] more difficult because other countries have higher standards for social media platforms,” he said.
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He was also critical of the newspaper’s libertarian shift under Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, joining other former insiders who took the buyout.
In his Substack, he wrote, “working at the Post feels like being on the Titanic after it struck an iceberg — drifting aimlessly as it sank, with not enough lifeboats for everyone. The Carpathia (i.e., Bezos) appears too far away and too distracted to help. And the captain is shouting commands that the solution is a different ship.”