Former Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler found himself on the receiving end of some overdue accountability this week.
In a revealing interview on Mark Halperin’s “What’s Next” podcast on Thursday, Kessler, who worked with the Washington Post for 27 years, squirmed and stammered his way through a series of straightforward questions about liberal media bias.
He was oblivious to such bias.
Halperin, to his great credit, asked the kinds of questions conservative Americans have been asking for more than a generation.
“My theory would be [that] … you attract a lot of liberal readers because your reporters are hostile to Republicans more than Democrats,” Halperin said, before asking his guest how he interpreted the theory.
“Yes, I completely reject it,” Kessler replied, before stumbling through a rambling defense of The Washington Post’s editorial tone.
“Uh, I think, um, uh — that … I mean, how to … how — how to — how to — I’m — how to phrase this?” he said.
No line more accurately summed up the cadence of the interview than that one.
Kessler laughably claimed the Washington Post was just as hard on former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton as it has been on President Donald Trump.
He also blamed Trump for the fact that more and more Americans are realizing that the biased legacy media is biased.
When asked if Washington Post reporters were indifferent to whether Trump or Biden won in 2020, Kessler again stalled.
Halperin asked if he’d ever read a story in the Washington Post and understood why conservatives would be upset.
Kessler found the question nearly impossible to answer, at least in any language resembling English.
Eventually, he landed on the idea that the outlet’s perceived bias wasn’t deliberate.
That excuse didn’t hold up for long.
Halperin pressed Kessler on his 2024 “fact check” labeling videos of Joe Biden’s apparent cognitive decline as so-called “cheapfakes.”
Kessler defended the move, saying he only fact-checked one specific video clip before he told an entire country that Biden was fit for office and that what people were seeing was not in context.
“You are saying in that column – to any normal reader – the Washington Post is saying the chatter about cognitive decline is made up…”@MarkHalperin debates @GlennKesslerWP about his infamous “fact check” of Biden “deepfake” videos, which Kessler says he still stands by.… pic.twitter.com/ssKfYurd1P
— Next Up with Mark Halperin (@NextUpHalperin) August 7, 2025
But Halperin wasn’t buying it.
“You know the power that you had in that job,” Halperin said. “People say that and say, the Washington Post is saying that that video is not reflective of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.”
When asked how well the Washington Post covered Biden’s decline, Kessler admitted, the paper tried to write that story, but “it never came together.”
When grilled by Halperin, Kessler admitted, “Yes, in retrospect, one could say, ‘God, that was a real missed opportunity.’”
A missed opportunity indeed — one that helped shape public perception that Biden was not only capable of doing his job, but for doing it for four more years.
This interview is remarkable and worthy of a watch from beginning to end.
Kessler was completely unprepared to defend his record, and the interview shows how accustomed he is to being coddled and celebrated by his left-wing peers.
Whether he was lying or delusional, it’s clear that the Washington Post’s former fact checker couldn’t face the facts about his own career.
Writers at the Washington Post love to hang their hats on the idea that they’re somehow speaking truth to power.
Kessler had a lot of power in his position at the outlet, and Halperin nailed him for abusing it.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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