Controversies as Washington Post Fact Checker

As 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.[15] If the statement is truthful, the person will get a rare “Geppetto.” Advocates on both the right and the left have criticized him for some of his rulings, and he is regularly denounced as being either a liberal or a conservative[citation needed]. Yet other readers have praised him for apparently even-handed treatment of both parties.[16][17]

Kessler gave Four Pinocchios to Mitt Romney for claiming President Obama went on an “apology tour” overseas,[18] but he also has regularly given as many as Four Pinocchios to Democrats for attacks on the House Republican plan for Medicare.[19] A writer for the New York Times said that Kessler’s analysis of Obama’s statements on the Israel-Palestinian conflict should be “should be required reading this week for those wishing for a clearer understanding.”[20]

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.[21] The conservative-leaning 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.”[22] 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.[23] 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.”[24]

The liberal-leaning 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.”[25] 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.[26] 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.”[27]

In a letter to Power Line, Kessler wrote: “I have no political convictions but to the truth….Don’t assume my politics, because either from the right or left, no one really has any clue. I am strictly nonpartisan—which, to some people, appears to be the most irritating thing of all.”.[28] Politico has reported that Kessler “sometimes struggles with his own measure of truth or ‘truthiness,’ the Pinocchio…but that it offers him a measure of consistency and is defined in a way that avoids presuming that someone intended to mislead. The obvious truths and falsehoods are relatively easy to assign, but the area in the middle can be hazy. “’Two and three Pinocchios, that gets difficult,’ he said.”[29]

According to a history of political fact-checking, Kessler says “he has received calls from senior politicians wanting to know what they need to do in order to avoid receiving more Pinocchios. ‘I have learned my lesson,’ said one errant member of the House of Representatives. ‘I am not going to utter another word on this subject without having my staff check it over.’”[30]