Glenn Kessler (born July 6, 1959) is an American editor and writer who has written "The Fact Checker" feature for The Washington Post since 2011.
[5] Kessler also was a reporter with Newsday for eleven years, covering the White House, politics, the United States Congress, airline safety and Wall Street.
[6] [7][8] His examination of the government's failure to recognize that DC-9-10 jets were susceptible to stalling in icy conditions[9] won the Premier Award from the Aviation/Space Writers Association.
[19] 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.
"[20] He documented the growth of fact checking around the world in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, written after training journalists in Morocco.
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.[24][relevant?]
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."[26][relevant?]
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.
[39] The Washington Post on April 22, 2020, announced[40] that Kessler and his team had written a book, "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies," to be published June 2 by Scribner.
"More than a catalogue of false claims, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth is a necessary guide to understanding the motives behind the president's falsehoods," the announcement said.
"[44] In August 2018, Kessler came under fire for his coverage of a Mercatus Center study on the perceived costs of Senator Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All plan.
[45][46] Kessler released corrections to his fact check, which stated the Sanders's claims of $2.1 trillion in 10-year National Health Expenditure savings were cherry-picked.
Jacobin criticized Kessler for what they perceived as him ignoring data in his article, and accused him of writing it in order to benefit Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.
[53] Kessler responded to the criticism: "Since there was some Twitter outrage about this assessment, please note that this is a summary of a previous fact check, in which we said Sanders had the 'most accurate sound bite' on this issue among Democrats running for president.
“The intent of the piece was to spotlight the need for careful reporting in a time when information spreads rapidly," Washington Post spokeswoman Shani George told the Associated Press.
[71] “Scott tells a tidy story packaged for political consumption, but a close look shows how some of his family's early and improbable success gets flattened and written out of his biography,” Kessler wrote.
“Against heavy odds, Scott's ancestors amassed relatively large areas of farmland, a mark of distinction in the Black community at the time.” Scott denounced the article, referring to it in his response to President Biden's address to Congress that “a national newspaper suggested my family's poverty was actually privilege because a relative owned land generations before my time.”[72] Other commentators also criticized the report.
[81] He was born in Cincinnati, where his father, Adriaan Kessler, was an executive at Procter & Gamble,[82] and he attended high school there and in Lexington, Kentucky.
Kessler's mother, Else Bolotin, was a psychologist[83] who in Lexington "helped women in that era of feminist awakening confront a society dominated by men.