Perhaps your initial reaction to reading the above headline was, Who the heck is Kessler? If that’s the case, don’t worry. You’re not alone.
Glenn Kessler has been, for nearly 15 lousy years, the “fact-checker” for The Washington Post. As such, he’s toiled in relative anonymity to those of us in flyover country, but his influence among the Beltway Booboisie during that time can’t be overstated. There in the tony salons, there among the gossip-traders and chardonnay-sippers at Café Milano and Le Diplomate, Glenn Kessler was held in high regard. Why? Because those were his peeps.
“After more than 27 years at The Washington Post,” Kessler posted on his Facebook page, “including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout. Much as I would have liked to keep scrutinizing politicians in Washington, especially in this era, the financial considerations were impossible to dismiss.”
But notice that self-important capitalization in Kessler’s post. He’s been The Fact Checker, he’ll have you know. And notice, too, the wide net he casts when he talks of “scrutinizing politicians in Washington,” when the truth is that this schoolmarmish ninny pretty much scrutinized only Republican politicians.
At least Kessler is getting a buyout — which is more than we can say for the recent defenestration of Trump-deranged unfunnyman Stephen Colbert by CBS. What we have in Kessler’s case, then, is further evidence of the desire of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to restore his journalistic plaything to a position of relevance. Having lost boatloads of money during the newspaper’s decade-long Trump-derangement fetish, Bezos, like CBS with Colbert, has clearly had enough.
Why is Bezos offering these buyouts? Because, well, it makes good business sense. As our Nate Jackson put it earlier this year:
Initially, Trump Derangement Syndrome paid off, increasing subscriber numbers and web traffic. After Joe Biden took office in 2021, however, the Post lost half a million subscribers in a couple of years. It lost another 250,000 after Bezos blocked an endorsement in last year’s presidential election — complete with an op-ed explaining his decision. Think about that: People read The Washington Post because they can count on it to endorse Democrat policies and politicians, and they take their ball and go home when that doesn’t happen. Last year alone, the paper lost $100 million.
So that giant sucking sound you hear near the paper’s DC offices is Bezos’s money going down the drain, and it’s due to the tiresome left-wing bias of the paper’s staff.
As Bezos clearly understands, you can indulge the Left’s Ahabian Trump Derangement Syndrome for a while, but it gets kinda old and expensive after a decade or so.
If the legacy media is a self-discrediting organism — and it is — then Glenn Kessler is one of its leading practitioners, having repeatedly betrayed his Beltway bias over the years. Take, for example, that time three years ago when he arrogantly and incorrectly dismissed the term “fetal heartbeat” as “a misnomer,” and he called Republicans “disingenuous” for repeatedly stating the inconvenient truth that Democrats support abortion “up until the moment of birth.”
But Kessler’s anti-science bias is selective. As political poster Greg Price reminds us, it was he who sneeringly derided Republican Senator Ted Cruz for having suggested that the COVID-19 virus might have come from a lab. “I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus to jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists.” And then this howler: “We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.” Only a handful of dead-end mask mavens in Ann Arbor and Berkeley still cling to the notion that the deadly outbreak of chocolately goodness just a stone’s throw from that Wuhan chocolate factory was entirely coincidental.
Yet when his paper played Praetorian Guard to the Autopen Presidency — such as when it lied in a headline that “inflation is falling” and cried in its next breath, “Why aren’t people noticing?” — Kessler sat on his hands and stared at his shoes. Worse yet, Kessler was an active participant in the Biden Protection Racket. “Cheapfake Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” he once said of the authentic video of the former president shuffling around aimlessly, waiting to be rescued by the Italian prime minister.
In Kessler’s world, with very few exceptions, only Republicans ever rate Pinocchios. And so, to him, we say, “Good riddance.”
