The headline of Paul Sperry’s latest investigative piece at realclearinvestigations.com is “For Washington Post’s Feared ‘Pinocchio’ Fact Checker, Forthrightness Dies in ‘Updates’ to Biden-Burisma Story”.
If you click on that title you will find a lengthy, fact-packed, fully referenced, epic take-down of the Washington Post and Glenn Kessler’s desperate attempt to protect Joe Biden from the truth about his involvement with son hunter biden epic proportions. I urge you to do just that and read every word.
Here is how it begins:
For the second time in three years, the Washington Post has quietly “updated” one of the most consequential fact checks in the history of American politics – its October 2020 article undercutting reports that Hunter Biden arranged a dinner meeting between one of his foreign business clients and his father, who was then vice president of the United States.
The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved interviews with a host of Biden aides who vehemently disputed the vice president’s attendance at the dinner and advanced the theory that the source of the information – a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop – was untrustworthy and possibly a Russian plant.
That conspiracy theory was quickly embraced by 51 former intelligence officials, who signed an open letter dismissing the New York Post’s scoop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the Washington Post fact check were used by the Biden campaign, other media outlets, and social media platforms to discredit the information contained on the laptop in the final days of the campaign. The article, Kessler would later boast, was “one of the most read articles in our 13-year history” of the fact-checking feature.
And here is part of how it ends:
Republican lawmakers say the Post’s inaccurate and misleading “fact-checking” is a microcosm of how the Washington press corps has been ignoring evidence of Biden family influence-peddling and corruption, which they say has had a chilling effect on criminal investigations. Media coverage often drives investigations into public corruption as well the appointment of independent prosecutors when there is a political conflict, as in the case of the Biden-controlled Justice Department looking into the Biden family. But not during this administration.
The Post’s influential Fact Checker staff brands stories or public statements it deems false or misleading with “Pinocchios.” A fact-check that earns one Pinocchio “shades the facts,” according to the newspaper’s criteria, while one garnering four Pinocchios is condemned as a “whopper.” Democrats and political commentators routinely cite Kessler’s findings to
bolster – or impugn – politicians or points of view.
By his own measure, Kessler’s Biden-Burisma dinner story containing significant factual errors would have earned four Pinocchios.
If that is how it begins and ends, there must be some helluva middle, wouldn’t you say?
If so, you got that right.
Use the link I’ve provided – here it is again – and see for yourself. You won’t be disappointed (unless you still believe the Washington Post is a neutral news venue and Glenn Kessler is an unbiased fact-checker, that is).
