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It is obviously impossible to calculate the percentage of truth in any one statement, something that Kessler acknowledged when we talked recently-referring to the wooden puppet used as the Post ’s Fact Checker logo as “a marketing gimmick.” At the same time, he sees no reason to give it up, and says, “We can spend hours debating whether something is a three or four Pinocchio.” Today’s hazy “fake news” landscape is too treacherous for us to spend that much time measuring the depth of every tar pit it would be a better service to readers to provide an overall map-and warn them about the motivations of those who would lead them astray. Context-free and misleadingly specific, Pinocchios give readers an impression that the only thing that matters about a claim is the degree to which it is true. Perhaps Kessler should hesitate before tsk-tsking at those who present guesstimates as facts ultimately, arbitrary measurements like Pinocchios are even more pernicious than guesstimates. The left’s concerns about Kessler’s bias have to do with flattening in that, even as the Post ’s Fact Checker merely evaluates individual statements, it winds up putting quotidian political spin (Biden railing against the Trump tax cut since “all of it went to folks at the top”) on the same plane-four Pinocchios!-as Trump’s relentless promotion of racist tropes, including his multiple, wildly exaggerated claims about “migrant caravans.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets three Pinocchios for saying that Trump transferred millions in federal funds to build a border wall, but “$0” to combat the opioid epidemic-a “misleading claim,” wrote Kessler-and Trump gets the same grade for tweeting, “Puerto Rico has been given more money by Congress for Hurricane Disaster Relief, 91 Billion Dollars, than any State in the history of the US,” which Kessler determined to be “simply false,” albeit based on a “guesstimate.” Trump’s empty boast about the environment received the dreaded four Pinocchios the second merely appeared in the Post ’ s database of Trump mistruths. And the dubious quantitative measure the Post uses-one-to-four Pinocchios-isn’t applied to every claim. (The degree to which Trump’s ego is also a threat to democracy is a discussion for another time.) The trouble here is that the Post ’s Fact Checker gives little context for the maliciousness of Trump’s intent, how his distortions exacerbate existing fault lines in our society. One of those things is about Trump’s ego, the other is about a threat to democracy. The former is an easily checked fib about his resume the latter is a dangerously empty promise that misrepresents the administration’s almost complete abdication of election security measures.

I have received awards on the environment” (falsely asserted at a business roundtable in January 2017) gets the same amount of attention as Trump’s baseless assurances that he’s not worried about Russian interference in the 2020 election because “we… have strong backup systems…and we’ve been working very hard…on the ‘20 election coming up” (from a press conference in March 2018). Thus Trump’s “I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment. Kessler says that the Post team analyzes any public statement they can find. ICYMI: NPR parts ways with freelancer after Tucker Carlson targets her

I agree, and I also think that it dangerously minimizes the damage of Trump’s misrepresentations regarding policy. Trump supporters somewhat justifiably complain that it’s a Trump-specific project overly concerned with the most minute and obscure presidential utterances they think it unfairly exaggerates petty puffery. But what the partisan complaints about the Post ’s Fact Checker reveal is that it is doing something wrong. It’s a truism of journalism that sniping from “both sides” means you must be doing your job right. “For the Republicans, and for your all time favorite President, it is a Fake Fact Checker!” In July, Kessler was the subject of a lengthy take-down in The Outline (“ Glenn Kessler sucks and that’s a fact ”) that lambasted his column for offering “political language stripped of the very words that would be needed to advance a moral argument,” and failing to provide “meaningful resistance to Trump.” “The Washington Post is a Fact Checker only for the Democrats,” Trump tweeted a few months earlier. It celebrated having run down 10,000 of Trump’s false and misleading statements in April, a project that the occupant of the Oval Office sees as proof of fundamental bias. The Washington Post ’s fact checker column-“The Truth Behind The Rhetoric,” by Glenn Kessler-is one of the paper’s most visible franchises, targeted by left-wing Twitter and President Trump alike.