The Washington Post puts a lid on fact-checking

FPI / April 30, 2021

As President Donald Trump was getting his America First agenda rolling in February 2017, Washington Post so-called "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler created a “new interactive graphic” to track “every suspicious claim made by the president in his first 100 days in office.”

After Joe Biden's first 100 days in office, the Washington Post has put a lid on fact checking the White House.

Kessler tweeted on Monday that his team would continue to fact-check Biden “rigorously” but would no longer maintain the database started for Trump.

“Here’s the Biden database — which we do not plan to extend beyond 100 days,” Kessler said.

“Biden’s relatively limited number of falsehoods is a function, at least in part, of the fact that his public appearances consist mostly of prepared texts vetted by his staff,” Kessler proclaimed. “He devotes little time to social media, in contrast to his Twitter-obsessed predecessor, and rarely faces reporters or speaks off the cuff.”

The Post's Fact Checker is known for its one-to-four Pinocchio scale.

Some conservatives noted that there aren't enough Pinocchios on the scale to measure what the Post is doing.

“The Biden presidency is over. Rest easy,” tweeted media critic Stephen L. Miller. “Whew what an incredible 100 days presidency.”

Miller added: “I love how Kessler has to be begrudgingly pushed into doing the bare minimum that his job requires for 5 whole months.”

Others said the timing of Kessler's move was conspicuous considering he had just been slammed for his "fact-check" of South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

Ruthless podcast co-host Josh Holmes on Tuesday noted that Kessler's report was "anything but a fact-check" and accused him of "trying to discredit" Scott over his family's ancestry.

"He was so out of pocket — he was essentially in this article making the argument that Tim Scott's Black family in the Deep South decades and decades and decades ago had it easy," co-host Comfortably Smug said. "He was like, 'Listen, Tim Scott talks about pulling himself up by the bootstraps, but his family had land during the Jim Crow South.' That was his argument! Like, that was the fact-check!"

Co-host Michael Duncan gave Kessler "a little bit of credit" for fact-checking Biden's false claims about Georgia's election reform bill, which earned "Four Pinocchios", but did a "heel turn" with the Tim Scott fact-check.

"All of these media companies have built their subscriber base exclusively off the left-wing hate of Donald Trump, right?" Holmes chimed in. "It's the only reason they're profitable and now that circulation is down 50 percent, that viewership on TV is down 50 percent for CNN, they're taking huge dives."

Holmes continued, "They're like, 'Man, how do we recreate the magic?' So a guy like Kessler write an honest take on the Georgia election law, gets skewered by the left, so now he's got to have a make-good. Well, here it comes, Tim Scott, here's your big opportunity. And he throws this thing out there and he just got roasted."

"It's pretty sad. It's pathetic but it's really how it is," Smug agreed. "If they see, 'Oh my gosh, Twitter is mad it me,' they learn really fast, 'Okay, I got to get back to what sells.' And what sold in the first place is, 'Well, Trump is bad.' Well, Trump's not there folks. Now they're out of ideas."

James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal noted: "The propagandists who now dominate the establishment media have little interest in 'fact-checking' Joe Biden as they did Donald Trump. But the Biden administration seems to be doing the job all by itself."

Freeman noted that the "economic fairy tale" told by Biden on Wednesday night was debunked by his government’s data release on Thursday morning.

"The Biden fairy tale is that the U.S. was in an economic crisis when he took office. He began telling this tall tale even before taking the job. Joining with former presidential campaign rival Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s most famous Marxist, Biden last year formed a legion of gloom to justify the historic government expansions to come," Freeman wrote.

On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that during the first quarter when the Biden administration began, the U.S. economy was soaring.

“Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2021,” according to the advance estimate released by Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. This follows growth of more than 4 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and a rip-roaring 33.4 percent in the third.

Biden, meanwhile, "continues telling his tale in an attempt to justify his LBJ-style lunge for bigger government," Freeman wrote.

On Wednesday, Biden claimed the U.S. was in the midst of the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression."

Reality: Unemployment in the 1930s soared to roughly 25 percent. Since October of 2020 it’s been below 7 percent. By January it had fallen to 6.3 percent. The U.S. unemployment rate has been higher at some point in every decade since the 1930s, including for the entire first five years of the Obama-Biden administration.

Yet Biden kept on spinning: "Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation: America is on the move again... America is rising anew... After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for takeoff..."

As Freeman noted: "A hundred days ago the raging fire was the aggressive effort by businesses to find workers for all the open positions available for people willing to work. Thanks to data releases by the Biden administration, we now know that the job market was just as robust as it seemed when he was taking office."

The number of job openings changed little at 6.9 million on the last business day of January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday.

"That’s a historically strong number, and thanks to an April release from the Biden administration, we know that the job market got even stronger during Biden’s first full month in office — before he had enacted anything of consequence," Freeman noted.

Freeman noted it was gratifying "that Biden employees in the federal government have taken over the job of puncturing" Biden's "false economic claims from media folk who are no longer willing to do the work."

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