Former Washington Post Fact-Checker Complains Outlet Wasn’t Liberal Enough

Former Washington Post editor Glenn Kessler, who had written “The Fact Checker” since 2011, expressed dismay on Tuesday about the outlet becoming less left-leaning.

The Post decided not to endorse a 2024 presidential candidate in October, and its owner, Jeff Bezos, announced in February that the outlet’s opinion section would focus on defending personal liberties and free markets. Kessler, in a Substack piece, criticized both moves as repelling the Post’s left-wing readership.

“hile it would be great to get a more balanced mix of liberal and conservative readers, I didn’t understand how one could attract conservative readers … without alienating existing readers,” Kessler wrote. “The Post opinion pages already had an array of liberal, conservative and libertarian voices, but that’s not the same as the news pages. The Washington Post news division prides itself on accountability journalism, scrutinizing whoever is in power. Then, in October, Bezos killed a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential election.”

“he time to announce a no-endorsement policy was at the start of the election cycle, not weeks before a close election. The Post’s liberal readers viewed it as a move to curry favor with Trump, and 300,000 canceled their subscriptions within days — 12 percent of total digital subscriptions,” he added. “Another 75,000 people canceled when Bezos then announced in February that the opinion page would pivot to defending personal liberties and the free market. Not necessarily conservative but certainly libertarian.”

Kessler argued Bezos’ announcement signified a shunning of left-wing editorial writers.

“n terms of building readership, the new editorial policy didn’t make sense. The Post’s liberal columnists generated huge traffic — that’s because of the liberal slant of the readership — and now they’ve all quit,” he wrote. “Every day, I checked the daily traffic numbers and, year over year, it was like being on a waterslide — with no bottom.”

Kessler announced on July 28 that he was departing the Post after taking a buyout.

He faced backlash for some of his checks, notably a June 2024 piece that asserted certain videos of former President Joe Biden’s struggles were “cheap fakes.” He also accused the New York Post and the London Telegraph of following the lead of the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) website in the article.

“The use of these clips is an especially pernicious couple of examples of manipulated video — what we label ‘isolation’ under our guide to manipulated video — because it’s intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the event as it occurred,” Kessler wrote. “The RNC and its avid followers in the conservative media earn Four Pinocchios.”

The Post did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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