Not for the species – yet, I’m keeping the “Fact Checker” tag for a while – but certainly for one of the more prominent ones, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post. who has decided to take the buyout option that owner Jeff Bezos offered employees instead of firing them. Kessler announced the exit himself:

After more than 27 years at The Washington Post, including almost 15 as The Fact Checker, I will be leaving on July 31, having taken a buyout.

An equally significant tell of the change afoot at the newspaper is that the position of “fact checker” itself has not been filled, though Kessler had been waiting for one. I interpret that to mean that he took the buyout because he knew he would be fired in August if he didn’t take it, but “offered” to keep doing “fact checks” until they found a replacement for him, and management told him “No, we’re good, now clear out your desk.”

There has already been a steady stream of departures as Bezos desperately tries to turn his newspaper into something other than the echo chamber of the Democrat Party and Leftist causes. All of the left-wing propagandists are outing themselves, resigning because they know for a fact they cannot be objective and do not wish to be. They wish to be paid propagandists. But even amidst the likes of Jonathan Capehart, and Philip Bump, Kessler was in a class of his own because the role of “fact checker” enabled him to hide his Leftism better than an opinion columnist like them.

In 2018, when the Fact Checker team was compiling a database of more than 30,000 Trump claims, I told the New York Times that “I have the best job in journalism.”

Of course he did. He’s a bitter left-wing propagandist who was paid to type up bitter left-wing propaganda talking points from the Democrat Party. The Free Beacon has a longer and more detailed list of Kessler’s bullshit, including the four listed in the tweet above.

More juicy goodness about Kessler here from a real journalist, Matt Taibbi as he gets stuck into Kessler’s fact checking tongue-bathing of the Intelligence Community’s work on the claim that Putin favoured Trump in 2016:

Strictly speaking, “careful investigative work” isn’t a checkable phrase. It doesn’t contain a time or date, the length of an Ibex horn, even a pierceable superlative like “greatest economy in history.” But Kessler in the past has asserted the power to measure the mathematical velocity of human wrongness (“the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time…”), so we may as well take a whack.

“Fact-checking” in the MSM context always was a stupid and mendacious trend where reporters with preconceived opinions could cherry-pick statements and then “fact-check” only within the context needed to push their desired narrative. If reporters had simply been telling the truth in their regular reporting to start with, then why would they need a “fact-check”? The entire point of slapping “fact-check” on something was to give it the false air of being completely nonpartisan when it essentially never was – which was what had already happened to reporters, thus losing the trust of their readers.

It was a facade that people saw through pretty early. But as with many of their other flaws, the MSM clung grimly to it, apparently having no idea what else to do, becoming non-partisan and non-ideological being a step too far.

Of course the most powerful aspect of Kessler and his entire “fact-checking” industry has been what they don’t cover, which, again, has also always been the super-power of the rest of the MSM, the selective half-truth. How do you avoid having to say a Democrat lied? You just don’t report on their lie. That way nobody can call you a liar either or “fact check” you. Kessler would often cover the most mundane, explained-by-context stuff from Republicans while simply not even bothering to look at obvious falsehoods told by Democrats, with Biden’s numerous dingbat stories – like his uncle being eaten by cannibals in WWII – being especially ignored.

Good riddance to Kessler, and with luck, to the rest of such “fact checkers”.