The Washington Post Fact Checker is leaving the field. After almost 15 years of fact-checking, Glenn Kessler took a buyout as part of the Post's recent newsroom overhaul. Kessler helped rejuvenate fact-checking journalism in the United States, along with organizations like PolitiFact (owned by Poynter) and FactCheck.org. Kessler elevated fact-checking to a regular feature of the Post’s political culture with his signature “Pinocchio” rating system as a fun shorthand for measuring political dishonesty.
During his tenure, Kessler became best known for his meticulous tracking of President Donald Trump's false and misleading claims, documenting more than 30,000 statements during Trump's first term — a count that became a widely repeated metric of Trump’s relationship to truth. That work culminated in the 2020 book "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth," co-authored with Post colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly.
Kessler's departure has prompted him to assess both the Post's institutional problems (chronicled in a candid Substack post) and the fact-checking field's declining fortunes, particularly the loss of tech platform backing.
I wanted to speak with Kessler on how the political landscape has evolved during his tenure, the institutional pressures facing fact-checkers today, and what his departure means for accountability journalism at a time when false claims spread faster than ever. Our conversation touched on everything from Trump's normalization of political lying to the economics of sustaining fact-checking operations in an increasingly polarized media environment.
Angie Drobnic Holan: How has the landscape of political misinformation changed since you started with the Fact Checker column in 2011?
Glenn Kessler: The biggest change is that social media has allowed false claims to just shoot around the world faster than ever, and it makes it harder to stamp out. There's a famous quote by the former editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, which is that a lie goes around the world before the truth even gets its pants on. I think Ben said that in the 1960s or ’70s. And now that's happening at hyper speed. So it’s made it really difficult to stay on top of false claims.
The other big change is that, at least in the United States, Donald Trump has made it quite acceptable for politicians to lie with impunity, and not face apparent pushback or consequences from ordinary people. In fact, he managed to construct an alternative world in which the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was just a peaceful gathering of supporters.
Holan: It seems like social media gives more attention and virality to lies, because a lie can be so much more dramatic than the truth. And then politicians saw that the penalty for telling a lie isn't what it once was. So maybe there’s become more of an incentive to tell lies?
Kessler: Right. When I started, you saw politicians that would exaggerate or inflate, but except for very rare occasions, they wouldn't just outright lie. And now you see that all the time. There's such a difference between the 2016 version of Marco Rubio running for president against Donald Trump versus the 2025 version of Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state.
Holan: What’s an example of that?
Kessler: I’m thinking of tweets that the State Department recently put out about Europe’s Digital Services Act that thousands of people have been convicted for criticizing the government. (Editor’s note: On X, the State Department said, “In Europe, thousands are being convicted for the crime of criticizing their own governments” in reference to the Digital Services Act.) I used to cover the State Department. They didn't put out statements like that before. … People have not been convicted, certainly not thousands of people have been convicted, under the Digital Services Act. When I asked the State Department for evidence of this, for two days straight they said, we need more time, and can you extend your deadline? And then finally they said, off the record, we decline to comment.
Holan: I do think your departure is going to leave a big hole in fact-checking efforts, because you were such a steady presence, fact-checking some of the biggest claims in U.S. politics. Do you think fact-checking is on the decline in the United States?
Kessler: Well, if The Washington Post does not replace me, I would definitely agree with that statement, because I think along with FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, The Washington Post was an important part of what sustains fact-checking in the United States. There are other organizations, of course, like Lead Stories, and CNN continues to do fact-checking, so there's more fact-checking now than when I started.
I feel that the lessons that fact-checkers have provided over time have become much more embedded in American journalism. Reporters who are (now) covering the president’s speech started to embed within their articles “this is wrong” when what he said was not true, or “there's no evidence to support what he said.” When I started, the reports were just what the president said, and then the reporters would wait for me to say, “No, that's wrong.”
Holan: I've seen that trend too. I do think that the fact-checking movement has really inspired more journalists who are not called fact-checkers to incorporate fact-checking into their news stories, and I think that's been really heartening and good news for the public.
Kessler: The other thing at The Post, we have a whole visual forensics team … They were a Pulitzer finalist this year for the visual forensics they did where they checked claims made by the Israeli government about what happened in Gaza. They used visual tools to say that that Israeli story does not add up because this is what we found using satellite imagery and phone videos, and that sort of thing. So that's another form of fact-checking that did not exist when I started.
Holan: I wanted to ask you about your responses to critics, and there's two schools here. First, what is your response to critics who say that fact-checking is biased against conservatives?
Kessler: To me, it's a phony, made-up narrative. Because it's easy to say, “Oh, they're saying the Republicans are liars, and look at all the fact checks they've written.” I have on the “About the Fact Checker” page a sentence that says divided government is better for the fact-checker. We write about statements that are important, and statements that are important are made by powerful people. And we write about people who are in power. … I respond to a lot of readers asking, “Is this statement correct?” and they're going to hear the statements made by President Trump who talks to the cameras five times a day, or the statements made by the speaker of the House or the statements made by the majority leader of the Senate. And yes, in an ideal world, it would be 50-50, but it's just not what people are seeing, particularly when no one pays attention to what the Democrats are saying.
Holan: That leads me to my next question: What do you say to liberals who say you're just practicing false equivalence when you fact-check Democrats?
Kessler: That is one of the more ridiculous statements I've heard. I looked for statements that would help me elevate and explain complex policy issues. I fact-checked Joe Biden quite a bit when he was the president. I always say the president is almost always going to be the most fact-checked person. Towards the end of Biden's presidency, it was a little hard to fact-check him because he almost never spoke before the cameras. That’s in contrast to the current president, who won't stop talking before the cameras and won't stop posting on social media.
But Democrats are fooling themselves if they think their politicians are not misleading — they do mislead. I used to say that there's no difference between the two political parties in this way: Both sides will exaggerate if they think it gives them a political advantage.
Holan: Do you have any advice for the broader fact-checking community? 2025 has been challenging on many levels.
Kessler: I don't know what to say about how to raise money or anything like that. I would just say that I think, in the long run, history will look back and say what fact-checkers are doing, and have been doing, is an important contribution to the political discourse in this world. And that we just have to keep going forward and making sure that we are as accurate and as fair as possible as we debunk facts, and that eventually the worm will turn.
