Glenn Kessler

Glenn Kessler (born July 6, 1959) is an American former diplomatic correspondent who has helmed the "Fact Checker" feature for The Washington Post since 2011.

Kessler is a 1981 graduate of Brown University and received a Masters of International Affairs in 1983 from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Kessler is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy.

Kessler's reporting played a role in two foreign policy controversies during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Kessler’s investigative articles on airline safety for Newsday in the early 1990s prompted congressional hearings into safety issues and spurred the federal government to impose new safety rules for DC-9 jets and begin regular inspections of foreign airlines.

His examination of the government’s failure to recognize that DC-9-10 jets were susceptible to stalling in icy conditions won the Premier Award from the Aviation/Space Writers Association.

At Newsday, Kessler shared in two Pulitzer Prizes given for spot news reporting.

In the Washington Post "Fact Checker," Kessler rates statements by politicians, usually on a range of one to four Pinocchios – with one Pinocchio for minor shading of the facts and four Pinocchios for outright lies.

If the statement is truthful, the person will get a rare "Geppetto."

Kessler has a new fact check at least five times a week; one column appears every week in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post.

Kessler's team includes another reporter and a video producer, who also write fact checks edited by Kessler.

In 1996, while at Newsday, "Kessler wrote what may have been the first lengthy fact-check story in a major American newspaper, a preemptive guide to a debate between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole aimed at helping viewers evaluate the claims they were about to hear."

He documented the growth of fact checking around the world in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, written after training journalists in Morocco.

A columnist for The Wall Street Journal attacked the whole idea of awarding Pinocchios as akin to movie-reviewing, saying "the ‘fact check’ is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news."

The conservative Power Line political blog devoted three articles to critiquing one of Kessler’s articles, calling him a "liberal reporter", and asserting that "these 'fact-checkers' nearly always turn out to be liberal apologists who don a false mantle of objectivity in order to advance the cause of the Democratic Party."

Kessler's awarding of Four Pinocchios to GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain for comments he made on Margaret Sanger and the founding of Planned Parenthood was also criticized by opponents of abortion.

Yet Power Line also said that Kessler's extensive review of Democratic charges that Romney was a "flip-flopper" turned out to be "admirably fair-minded."

The liberal blog Talking Points Memo took Kessler to task for giving Four Pinocchios to a Democratic web petition on Medicare, saying the errors he allegedly made "were not just small misses, but big belly flop misses."

The Obama White House issued a statement titled "Fact Checking the Fact Checker" after Kessler gave Obama Three Pinocchios for statements he made on the auto industry bailout.

The Democratic National Committee released a statement denouncing "Kessler’s hyperbolic, over the top fact check of the DNC’s assertion that Mitt Romney supports private Social Security accounts."

Kessler joined The Washington Post in 1998 as the national business editor and later served as economic policy reporter.

Kessler also was a reporter with Newsday for eleven years, covering the White House, politics, the United States Congress, airline safety and Wall Street.

He was called to testify in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, in which he was questioned about a 2003 telephone conversation with Libby in which the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, might have been discussed.

(Libby recalled they had discussed Plame; Kessler said they did not. ) Meanwhile, a 2004 telephone conversation between Kessler and Steve J. Rosen, a senior official at American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), was at the core of the AIPAC leaking case.

The federal government recorded the call and made it the centerpiece of its 2005 indictment of Rosen and an alleged co-conspirator; the charges were dropped in 2009.

Kessler, a specialist on nuclear proliferation (especially in Iran and North Korea) and the Middle East, wrote the first article on the North Korea nuclear facility being built in Syria that was destroyed by Israeli jets.

He was immediately attacked for spreading neoconservative propaganda but his reporting turned out to be correct and apologies were later offered.

In a lengthy article, Kessler also revealed the Bush administration's internal decision-making that led to the Iraq war.

He traveled with three different Secretaries of State – Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton – and for several years wrote a blog about his experiences on those trips.

An article he wrote on apparent tensions between Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a 2006 trip to Iraq was later denounced by Rumsfeld as "just fairly typical Washington Post stuff."

Kessler, who took charge of the Fact Checker feature in January 2011, is considered one of the pioneers in political fact checking, a movement that inspired nearly 300 fact-checking organizations in 83 countries, according to a tally by the Duke Reporters’ Lab.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the comic strip Doonesbury highlighted the vast disparity in Pinocchios given to Donald Trump versus Clinton.

Kessler also appeared in a segment of The Daily Show about fact-checking Trump.

"In terms of fact checking, Hillary Clinton is like playing chess with a real pro," he told Jordan Klepper.

"Fact-checking Donald Trump is like playing checkers, with somebody who’s not very good at it. It’s pretty boring. His facts are so easily disproved there’s no joy in hunt."

Shortly after Trump became President, Kessler announced a 100-day project to list every false and misleading statement made by Trump while in office.

Kessler's team counted 492 untruths in the first 100 days, or an average of 4.9 per day.

In response to reader requests, Kessler decided to keep it going for Trump's first year and then his entire presidency.

By January 20, 2021, the end of Trump's four-year term, Kessler and his colleagues had counted 30,573 untruths, or an average of 21 a day.

"Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year – and 39 claims a day in his final year."