The Original Fact Checker: How To Know What's True with The Post's Glenn Kessler

In Reality

Finding your way to the truth is the informal job of the 21st-century citizen. All of us. Unless you want to be manipulated, you need some check on the claims you hear uttered by powerful people or repeated, innocently or not, by others.
For a few thousand people in this era, correcting the record is a profession, even a calling, and today’s guest was one of the first and maybe its most famous practitioner. He’s Glenn Kessler, better known as the creator of the Washingon Post’s Fact Checker column, and maybe even better known for his Pinocchio rating of truth or falsehood.
Glenn’s a veteran journalist who got into fact checking during what now seem the innocent 1990s. The need for his work—and for that of hundreds of fact-checking organizations that sprung up in his wake—has only become more urgent in the age of social media and AI.
Glenn and Eric discuss the nature of factuality, how he and his team choose which claims to chase down, the factuality of popular memes like Joe Biden’s supposed corruption, and the particular falsehoods most repeated by both current US Presidential candidates. The day we spoke, Glenn was investigating a video released by the Republican National Committee that had been misleadingly edited to appear to show President Joe Biden wandering away from a G-7 meeting. Glenn gave that Four Pinocchio’s...

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