Fact Checking in an Era of Bullshit
One of the big ones has given up.
Glenn Kessler has taken a voluntary buyout from the Washington Post. In his last column, “The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning.” he takes stock of the state of play of his longtime vocation.
In reviewing many of the some 3,000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for president.
“Businessman Donald Trump is a fact-checker’s dream … and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his announcement speech. How little did I realize that would be true. Trump decreed that mainstream news organizations were “the enemy of the people,” undermining faith in traditional reporting, and insisted to his followers that he was the best source of information.
This will surprise few readers. It’s a topic we’ve covered for a decade now, often referencing Jeet Heer‘s December 2015 observation, “Donald Trump Is Not a Liar, He’s something worse: a bullshit artist.” To take two examples, see my July 2018 post “Buried in Trump’s Bullshit” or Michael Bailey’s June 2025 post “Seeing Double on Doubling Down.”
The phenomenon has been with us so long that it’s a bit hard to remember how stark the break was.
Before Trump entered politics, I found that many politicians spun or dissembled but most tried to keep their claims tethered to the truth. Our fact checks covered a range of topics, such as the accuracy of government statistics on students dying from alcohol or exaggerated claims about sex trafficking, which led lawmakers to stop using them.
President Barack Obama told the occasional whopper — “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan” — but it was the rare politician, such as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota), who constantly spouted Pinocchio-laden nonsense. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, also had a reputation for mangling the truth: In 2011, Biden touted an Obama-era jobs bill by claiming the number of rapes in Flint, Michigan, had — depending on the hour of the day — doubled, tripled or even quadrupled because the number of police had been reduced. There was no evidence to support any of his statistics.
But Bachmann and Biden were outliers. In the 2012 presidential campaign between Obama and Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, the two candidates were neck-and-neck in their average Pinocchio rating. Indeed, they had the lowest average number of Pinocchios of the major 2012 presidential candidates.
They also took fact checks seriously. Both candidates dropped talking points after a negative fact-check rating. An Obama administration official explained to me how, when faced with a choice of figures, the administration took the more modest number in hopes of avoiding Pinocchios. I heard from a campaign source that during debate prep, Obama, to his great annoyance, was told he couldn’t use a statistic because it had gotten Pinocchios. Obama’s campaign manager even sent a lengthy letter to The Post’s editor complaining that my Pinocchio ratings were undermining his attacks on Romney’s business record.
While Kessler’s overall point—that, despite conventional wisdom, most prominent politicians were reasonably honest—is true, part of the frustration Obama and others have had with Kessler and other fact checkers is their weird inability to distinguish broken promises from lies. To take the “whopper” Kessler begins with, President Obama’s 2009 pledge, “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period,” there’s just no evidence in the fact check that Obama was lying. While it may have been foolish to make a promise he couldn’t keep, I have no reason to think he didn’t mean it. And I voted for his opponent in both instances and opposed the bill.
Still, I do think the industry helped keep politicians honest. Until it didn’t.
The expectation that politicians would stick close to the truth began to erode with Trump’s emergence. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the 9/11 attacks — and doubled down even after my fact check proved this was a fantasy. He invented statistics — that the unemployment rate, then pegged at 4.9 percent, was really 42 percent — and kept repeating them, no matter how many times he was fact-checked.
In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible).
But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.
It’s the political equivalent of Gresham’s Law: if bad behavior is rewarded, good behavior becomes less common.
Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter — where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 — and other social media to spread his message. Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most talked about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data.
Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump — and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content — tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation.
In fairness, the Facebook model in particular had a left-leaning tilt. This was particularly true during the COVID pandemic, where now-debunked theories were considered the objective truth. And, again, I write that as someone who operated on the prevailing assumptions promoted by Anthony Fauci and other public health experts.
Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers — The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95 percent of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way.
During Trump’s first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios — the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term.
That’s an understandable decision. The fact checks clearly didn’t matter. Trump supporters either didn’t care whether the statements were true or dismissed the evidence against them as biased. And, frankly, once you get past 30,000, what’s one more?
Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost twenty times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California).
During the 2024 campaign, Trump sometimes mentioned Pinocchios, such as in a campaign stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, in October. “I have to be very careful when I talk because the fake news, if I say something wrong, a little wrong, if I’m 3 percent off … they’ll give me Pinocchios,” he told a rally. “You know the Pinocchio? The Washington Post, they give you Pinocchios. If you say something perfectly, they give you a Pinocchio.”
But since Trump took office for a second time in January, he hasn’t mentioned Pinocchios again. In an era where false claims are the norm, it’s much easier to ignore the fact-checkers.
Indeed. Especially once they stop fact-checking.
Fact-checking presumes the quaint idea that facts matter.
The biggest lie is the one that Glenn and the rest of the legacy media refuse to call out.
The big lie is that the Republican Party is a political party driven by a desire for good policy outcomes- a healthy economy, strong defense, reduced crime and general well-being of the citizens.
So they endlessly report every assault on truth and democracy as if it were merely some policy quarrel open for debate.
For example, that Harvard is in a “feud” with the administration rather than the recipient of an unprovoked attack.
They report attacks on DEI but can never explain why because the truth would expose the big lie; They report on the concentration camp, the open bribery and graft, but never offer any context or indicate in any way that these things are violations of the public trust and norms of democracy. They are always framed in the most generous “he said-she said” detached view from nowhere.
Yes, this is one of the most depressing things about the Trump era. The country had already been moving in this direction, where propaganda was becoming more and more an effective tool, but Trump was a quantum leap.
Ultimately, the American people have failed. Too many looked the other way or couldn’t be bothered to care. As always, my question is how do we fix it?
It’s broader than just fact checking. It’s the entire area of data and statistics. Since I am mostly a numbers guy I find this incredibly depressing. I can find any set of data that is acceptable to conservatives. (Of note, I participate in a couple fo libertarians sites and it is not an issue with libertarians as they are largely not in the Trump cult, of personality.) Note that they are perfectly happy to cite govt data, really any data source, as long as it supports whatever Trump says and they want to believe. Any source of numbers, not limited to but especially govt data, is wrong/fake news/politically biased as soon as it provides numbers not liked. While I am at it I guess I should note that it’s not just limited to numbers, it’s everything else but especially anything science based. I dont know how many times I have had conservatives tell me I am wrong about stuff I was actually doing in my practice of medicine where maybe being a department chair with 30 years of experience might mean I had some expertise. The basis for their claims would be some claims by some social media source or Youtube made by someone who AFAICT had never set foot in a hospital or read a primary source medical article.
I am also increasingly disappointed by people who arent Trump supporters per se but in an effort, I think, to both sides things keep claiming that something must be wrong with govt data without ever providing any evidence. They claim the numbers arent real because they are based upon statistical sampling. OMG, every study (I can think of) in medicine is based upon a sample. We have never done a study where we said we took new drug X and tested it on every person in the world so we know precisely down to 6 significant figures the efficacy and complication rates. We do smaller studies and get numbers that we know are statistically significant but still have a small chance of being wrong. We then adjust those numbers for usage on a specific population.
Anyway, I dont see much hope of this ever changing. Too many people make too much money be perpetuating these behaviors and its successful in getting people elected.
Steve
@steve222: You’re right. How long has the right been railing against “elites”, experts, even intelligence? Feels like it goes back decades.
That (and many other things) shows how cynical they’ve been about getting power and money at any cost. Just a matter of time before truth went out the window entirely. The sad part is how successful they’ve been.
Right after the 2024 election I was pretty worried that Trump’s lies were gaining traction, that his sphere of influence was growing in the electorate. For me that was the nightmare scenario, where Trump was not only able to use utter bullshit to build a power base, but that he was actually winning the debate and convincing people. I was worried that we might not be able to escape Trump’s alternate reality.
I’m slightly less worried about that now. I don’t think we’re out of the woods just yet, and in particular, I think they will roll out lies about “non-citizen voting” for the midterms that could be very destructive. But Trump hasn’t really changed the fundamentally polarized nature of the U.S., and the fundamentally ornery mood of the electorate.
Perhaps wishful thinking, but I’m holding on to hope that Trumpism dies with Trump. I think there’s a reason most normie politicians don’t try this tactic — most people just don’t have the combination of narcissism, amorality and charisma is takes to pull it off convincingly.
I’ve commented before that there isn’t anyone whose job is to prevent autocracy, i.e. who will get fired if autocracy succeeds. Kessler, as the most prominent fact checker was probably as close to it as anyone, as his job was to call out lies, to call out the creation of the alternate reality autocrats need to create.
And Kessler quit. I can understand it, Trump 1.0 must have been terribly frustrating as he didn’t expect to count 30,000 lies, which must have used every intern in the building, it doesn’t seem to have done any good, and current management don’t want that job done and would have forced him out anyway.
That said, my sympathy for Kessler is limited by his habitual bothsides in the above quoted statements. All politicians lie, but there does seem to be an order of magnitude, at least, difference.
Really can’t blame Mr Kessler for grabbing the money with both hands and running. A certain song by the Steve Miller band does come to mind.
The modified Costanza Principle: It’s not a lie if you don’t give a damn whether it’s true or not.
Tom Gilovich wrote a terrific book all the way back in 1991: How We Know What Isn’t So
Among many other gems comes this one, that I return to often:
Fact checking has a hard time competing with this component part of our cognitive apparatus. And the current social milieu has made this “game over.”
I have, a couple of times here, mentioned Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast, and Slow. It’s about intuition versus reason. Intuition, what Kahneman calls System 1, unconsciously makes all sorts of connections and comes up with answers. Completely untested answers. We can use System 2, reason, to test those answers, but we often don’t. System 1 believes what it produces. Especially if it coughs up what we want to believe.
George Lakoff noted that conservatives are well able to think through complex causation, but they default to simple morality. Which is a way of saying they uncritically accept System 1.
I like books like Kahneman’s Lakoff’s, but I can’t help but think there are hired gun sociologists, and poli sci guys, and psych people in back rooms in the Kochtopus using these books to polish their propaganda techniques.
It is a failure of our educational system that we don’t teach people how to think. It’s not a new thing – Boomers with our old-school, pre-woke primary educations don’t know how to think. We can read, write, calculate and memorize, but we’re mostly GIGO machines, closer to AIs than we like to believe we are.
We feed kids bullshit (Santa Claus, Jesus, various wildly exaggerated threats) almost from birth and make no serious effort to deprogram them and redirect them onto a more rigorous path. We teach them credulity and then social media fills the voids in minds incapable of independently assessing what is real and what is not. Social media abhors a vacuum.
And this the sort of tortured fake bothsidesism that has allowed rightwing bullshit to take hold.
What happened during the pandemic is that public health officials were responding in real time to a novel virus. Novel meaning never-before-seen. Guidelines were changing rapidly based on new evidence and new data. This not some biased liberal plot: it’s how science works.
The “now-debunked” theories weren’t pushed to appease the left, they were pushed based on the best available inform had at any given moment to try to save as many lives as possible, at a time when officials were flying blind into uncharted territory. While being undermined by an incompetent rapist pedophile president who had gutted the CDC China team deciding to mismanage the pandemic by lying constantly, fueding with mayors and governments instead of helping them, encouraging violation of mitigation and containment efforts.
That serious people who should know better help Trumpers peddle “left-leaning bias” revisionist history horseshit in a self-indulgent attempt to appear “fair” and even-handed exemplifies everything wrong with the white male establishment’s politics in the Trump era — fact-checkers included. This MAGA-enabling idiocy needs to stop. But won’t.
@gVOR10:
@ChipD:
QFE.
And this is why we’re not missing anything with the absence of folks like Kessler.
It’s astonishing to look at reporting on the civil rights battles of the 50s and 60s and contrast that we the mealy-mouthed, namby-pamby reporting on Trump’s fascism today. Back then, journalists treated racism as an empirical evil and reported accordingly. Today? An Epstein-bestie pedophile lies about why he fired the statistician whose objective data exposed his extremist regime as a job-killing failure, and headlines tell us how Trump is making “assertions without evidence.” Are you fucking kidding me?
Look at Murrow’s mince-no-words takedowns of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Stunning in their moral clarity. We need a media full of Edward R. Murrows today. There are a few, they are drowned out by midgets like Michael Smerconish and Bill Maher, the former of whom was out this week lecturing Democrats about how their criticism of Trump “cannot be blind” and how they should praise Trump on occasion.
Setting aside for a moment that I don’t ever remember these white media men telling this to Trump or Republicans when they were relentlessly smearing and trashing everything Obama and Biden did with no quarter (always have a different standard for Democrats), Smerconish just doesn’t get it.
Based on their race, Trump deported innocent people to a foreign prison where they were sexually assaulted and tortured without due process. This is a historic scandal so evil it boggles the mind. But Democrats need to look for opportunities to praise this monstrous administration? What a glib, shallow take.
Yes, Smerconish, we should all waste time pointing out how the broken clock is right twice day; we can’t just spend all our time reminding voters it’s a broken piece of crap that needs to be replaced. Mussolini did make the trains run on time after all. Yes, let’s take a break from Holocaust outrage to recall how Hitler painted pretty pictures and was nice to his dog and Eva Braun. Let’s take a pause from projecting our horror all the dead teenage boys buried under John Wayne Gacy’s house to acknowledge how he made a cute clown.
That’s what contemporary American journalism sounds like. With a few valiant exceptions, they are lacking for guts, cowed and failing at their duty. What do we need fact-checking for from the folks who still can’t call Trump’s Jan. 6 terror attack “a terror attack”? Useless.
Humans are social before we are rational. And when the two collide — if we allow the collision at all — we “choose” the social instead of the rational.
Truth bends more easily to belonging than to evidence. Put differently, thinking is overrated when it comes to understanding humans.
I think (heh) it’s important to keep that in mind.
Pro wrestling is patently fake but a lot of people love it. Why? Because they suffer no consequences from it. Harmless entertainment. It’s been a long time, if ever, since the US public suffered serious consequences from a POTUS being outrageous, or even outrageously fake.
The Germans did suffer from that. Big time. For the next several generations they seem to have preferred the blandest, most boringly factual political leaders they could find.
As a professional information wrangler, this really pisses me off.
As for how to remedy it, I have little idea, beyond continuing to insist on objective reality as a fundamental in education.
Trump is by far the worst instance of this tendency, but the impulse has been present for a long time. See absurd claims of anthropic CO2 effect denialists, etc.
In the UK Johnson could periodically reach near-Trumpian levels of bullshittery, and Truss was utterly delusional.
However, the Conservative Party does not seem to have collapsed into solipsistic subjectivity to anything like the same extent as have US Republicans.
I’d also note, some strains of the ideological “left” have a less than stellar record on such matters; though that has mostly been due to some pig-headed Stalinists and a fringe of the sillier “progressive relativists”.
Nut have normalised and mainstreamd it has much as Trump, and been applauded by a mass-movement for doing so, and increasingly been “whatevered” by large sections of the media.
@DK:..Yes, Smerconish, we should all waste time pointing out how the broken clock is right twice day; we can’t just spend all our time reminding voters it’s a broken piece of crap that needs to be replaced.
If a clock is digital and is broken so that it has no source of electricity, it has no display and it is never right.
@Michael Reynolds:
Is there any significant population that does know how to think, for your arbitrary definition of thinking?
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
Gotcha!
I have an old, and definitely stopped, digital clock in the attic that still seems to show “7:05” if you shine a torch on it at the correct angle. 🙂
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: Would that Trump had no “display”.
@Michael Reynolds: Our education system has its faults but I think this has much more to do with the home environment. The wife and I have been involved in High school speech and debate for close to 20 years, finally pulling away a few years when our age was making it difficult. Having judged a variety of debate, Student Congress and speech events over the years I can tell you that the kids bring and cite, with belief stuff that they hear at home. When you have been brought up since birth to believe that gays, liberals, trans people are evil no amount of schooling will change that. When you have been taught which information sources are reliable and true, and that doesnt include school, you dont easily overcome that at the K-12 level. Maybe when they leave the influence of home and go to college or start working they can shed that but not often will it happen sooner.
Steve
@DK:
Except science *is* the biased liberal plot.
The notion that there is a truth other than the ramblings of the autocratic senility is leftist in authoritarian times. And it’s why any early theories that don’t pan out must be amplified and declared fraud.
Our authoritarian president promises that only he can provide simple solutions to complex problems. Where “simple solution” means making his base happy enough to praise him for the next 20 minutes. If there is no simple solution (global climate change), then the problem is fake.
I wonder if judicious use of ivermectin could halt climate change?
Used in sufficient quatities, perhaps.
Unfortunately, perhaps, there seems to be little mass market for human consumption of ivermectin outside the US.
Denying reality is sometimes effective; but unforunately for the deniers, reality remains an obdurate thing, that no amount of denial can eradicate.
The harder you try, the more forcefully the boomerang eventually comes back.
@Gustopher:
Well, there’s me. . .
I guess I’d name the French among peoples with which I have any familiarity. They have long had a fondness for thinking. They do a little practical philosophy in primary school, and you don’t graduate High School without a year of philosophy. Their national leadership tends to be well-educated as well, almost always at Ecole National D’Administration, which is post-grad, after they’ve attended the best universities where they will have read deeply in Sartre and deBeauvoir and your Voltaires and Foucaults and whatnot.
IOW they are rational enough not to elect baboons, unlike the American people. They do not allow superstition to interfere with medicine, they don’t believe a country with more guns than people is reasonable, they have multiple actual newspapers, they don’t demonize experts or intellectuals, no death penalty, universal medical care, a number of beautiful and well-maintained cities without homeless camps under every freeway overpass, their violent crime rate is about a quarter of ours, their cops don’t routinely kick in doors or shoot people, there’s nearly free university where they learn that climate change is real and God is not.
Doesn’t mean they don’t have problems, or that they don’t make bad decisions, or that they’re a nation of geniuses, but they have a very well-ordered country, and an admirable lifestyle, all despite living between perfidious Albion and the Huns.
In response to the obvious retort, I would live there if they’d let me, but they’re also smart enough not to sell the country to well-heeled Americans and Brits, which means I can’t just wave some money under their noses to get a visa.
@JohnSF:
Since I used the term in the earlier comment I checked the auto-fill for, ‘perfidious.’ Third line is, ‘Albion.’ Apparently no other country on Earth is perfidious. Not judging, just sayin’.
@Michael Reynolds:
We be us, baby!
The origin is, iirc (there are a lot of alternative suggestions, lol), the British deciding that the alliance with Austria was not worth continuing war with France in 1711. After the fall of the pro-war Whigs. Thus cutting Austria off at the knees, and accepting a Bourbon inheritance of the Spanish throne.
Realistically, the Austrians had little cause for complaint: they got Belgium and the north Italian duchies.
Britain was not inclined to wage war to the death merely to obtain Alsace-Lorraine for the Habsburgs.
Generally, though, the UK has placed a high value on having a “word”: if we commit, cross us at your peril.
Our greatest failure re Czechoislovakia 1938 was arguably because the UK did not have a formal alliance; France did, but we rather stupidly refused to support that.
The idea that truth matters to someone that habitually cheats at golf and whose entire political party is modeled on the WWE isn’t even worth addressing.
Good on Kessler for grabbing the brass ring instead of tilting at windmills.
@Michael Reynolds:
The level of success of the RN in French elections (about 30% of the vote in 2024) is a rather significant contrary indicator, imuho.
Which pains me: I have a deep fondness for France and the French.
(If pressed to choose other countries to become a citizen of, France would be first on my list, with Australia at 2)
But it’s an indicator of a common factor in many OECD states: there is about a third of the population willing to vote for idiots, on the basis of existentential grump.
Their ability to achieve power seems to depend upon divided the “relatively rational” vote is.
Based on my encounters with French people, I continue to hope the rational will prevail.
@JohnSF:
@Michael Reynolds:
Thinking more about this, there is an evident large diffrence between the more and less highly educated French population.
This can be seen from statistics re RN votes relating to age and education profiles.
However, a recent, and worrying, trend in Europe, is for fairly well educated young people to vote “far right”.
This appears to be connected to the multiple factors of expensive housing, student debt, incomes compression of labour market entrants, and the toxic issue of migration.
It’s now the consensus in Europe that uncontrolled migration is simply not acceptable to the general public.
And that there must also be a mode for adequate housing that does not drain away almost all disposable income.
@reid: “ As always, my question is how do we fix it?”
That’s what I want to know. Does anyone out there have an answer? Is there an example of a country this far into authoritarianism that changed course before it got much worse?
@Scott O:
Excellent question. We know it wasn’t 30’s Germany.
Perhaps “even a Military Clock is right once a day,” is much more apt and accurate than “even a Clock is right twice a day.”
I believe that The Media writ large is now so locked into ‘both sides ..’ that serious analysis is largely in hibernation. The Media is intimidated by years of conservative critism that The Media is a biased liberal operation.
Just look at the recent revenge/distraction wherein Tulsi Gabbard claimed to have evidence that Barack Obama committed trasonous behavior by attempting to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign. Trump has, of course, subsequently gone after Obama with the treason claims. The Media response is basically ‘well, we don’t have evidence of this yet’ and act as if it’s a real possibility that Obama did as Tulsi and Donnie now claim.
We, our Institutions, have all collapsed and fallen onto bended knee before Trump.
@DK:
@DK:
Thank you for these righteous rants. Amen!
Gods and ghosts, wizards and witches, miracles at Lourdes, abduction by aliens, Heaven and Hell, virgins in Paradise … don’t human beings seem genetically (or perhaps culturally) predisposed to look for an imagined reality to live in to avoid having to confront the fundamental absence of meaning in the real one? The MAGA Cult’s make-believe world is simply the latest variation.
@Scott F.:
Seconded appreciation to DK! That bit about left leaning FB and debunked Covid theories hit me in the face as well while reading..