Why Washington Post 'fact checker' Glenn Kessler is not what he claims to be

I do not know Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post. I do not presume to claim he is a dishonorable man because he might think he is doing good and honest work.

But he is not. He is not what he claims to be. And he is hurting this country by a) casting aspersions on people who have been damaged by reckless actions of the United States government; and b) giving ammunition to propagandists who seek to attack such people in the service of big government. Now, if Mr. Kessler's work was labeled as opinion writing, it would be fine. It would not agree with it, but it would not be objectionable, although it also would not be very good. The problem with Mr. Kessler is that he labels his work as "fact checking," and that is not what it is. Worse, he has once again dishonestly labeled as "fact checking" a column that attacks yet another woman whose family has been damaged by ObamaCare - using rhetorical arguments that have little to do with facts in his attack against Shannon Wendt, who, as it happens, lives in the same area as I do.

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Before I show you that Kessler is not really a fact-checker, let me give you a little inside baseball from journalism so you'll know what a real fact checker is. The job of a fact-checker is, literally as the term suggests, to check objective facts in news stories. One of my external gigs is as a writer for a trucking magazine, which employs highly skilled and doggedly determined fact checkers. Frequently, after I have filed a story, I get a call from one of the fact checkers, and they are calling to double-check about facts. For instance:

• You said that company's headquarters is in Charlotte but their LinkedIn Page says it's in Topeka. Which is it?
• You said the company was founded in 1993 but their web site says it was in 1991. You need to double check.
• You called this guy's title Director of Fleet Maintenance but the association membership list calls him Director of Fleet Maintenance and Operations. We need to get it right.

I don't mean to suggest the fact-checkers only deal in mundane stuff like titles, dates or locations, which is not to say it's unimportant to get these things right. They will check things like the prices of products, or how you report someone's annual budget or salary. If it's a fact, they check it. What they do not do is write opinion pieces awarding "pinnochios" or "technical fouls" or "pants on fire" to people they presume to call liars, especially on the basis of things that are highly subjective, and especially when they don't have all the pertinent information and didn't even try to get it. Recently Kessler wrote a detestable hit piece on a woman named Julie Boonstra, a leukemia victim whose life and treatment regimen have been thrown into chaos by ObamaCare, all because Boonstra appeared in an ad telling her story. I looked deeply into Boonstra's situation and found that ObamaCare has indeed been a disaster for her. Kessler, who did not look deeply into it at all, gave her "three pinocchios" because his tertiary analysis of numbers he found on an insurance company's web site did not lead him to truly understand her situation. Once Kessler had spoken, other "fact check" sites plagiarized his work, and because it had come from a purported "fact checker," the left has treated it ever since as a foregone conclusion that Boonstra lied about her own situation. Last week, Kessler did it again to a woman named Shannon Wendt. First, here is the ad she appeared in:

Now, look how Kessler justified his labeling of her ad as "two pinocchios":

The Fact Checker leaves it to readers to decide if Wendt's active participation in GOP politics undermines her credibility as an Obamacare victim. But at this point, we do not have enough information to determine whether and how her insurance costs have become unaffordable, as claimed in the ad. So, for now, we have to leave this as verdict pending. Update, March 27: In light of the fact that the family had an option to choose a less expensive plan, we are changing the rating to Two Pinocchios. Clearly the family may not have been happy with the children going on Medicaid, and it is their right to choose a more expensive plan. But it makes her claim of "unaffordable" harder to swallow.

Since this was published, Wendt has published an op-ed that offers more details - the details Kessler didn't have when he went ahead and "fact checked" the ad, which raises the question of how he could presume to do a "fact check" in the first place when he did "not have enough information" (his words) to really know what was and wasn't a fact. But that last line in the update is the real stunner, especially because it doesn't deal with the fullness of Wendt's situation. Wendt acknowledged that, yes, they could have gone on Medicaid, although that seemed wrong because the family makes more money than seems right for someone applying for a program that is supposed to provide health care to the poor. Kessler treats her objection as based on nothing but ideology. But Wendt explains further that she was concerned about not only cost, but also quality and choice:

Wendt initially thought her family would qualify for a subsidy to lower insurance costs. But she found that was possible only if she put her children on MIChild, the state health insurance program for working families. The program covers children in families who earn up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of seven, that amount is $72,000 a year. She states that the family briefly received MIChild coverage but could find only two doctor's offices accepting new MIChild patients, and neither appeared to be a good option. She describes the care her daughter received as "terrible." And she later discovered her daughter did not receive the right immunizations. Wendt said finding a plan that included her doctor was her top priority, and MIChild does not include her doctor. "In order for my children to receive the care I feel they need and deserve, I need to keep the doctor that I have been with for almost 25 years," she said in an interview. "This is a doctor I love and trust." If her children were on MIChild, Wendt and her husband could get a subsidy for their health plan, she said. But she said the cost would still be higher than her current plan.

Kessler doesn't deal with any of this in his review of the ad, yet he presumes to call her a "pinnochio" liar times two? On what basis? Because, in his opinion, her claim of unaffordability is "hard to swallow"? This is completely absurd. What Kessler does is so far removed from what real fact-checkers do, he should be sued for misrepresentation and fraud. But the opposite will happen. ObamaCare defenders will cite what he's written as if it is the definitive last word on fact and truth because he labels himself a "fact-checker," and they will tar Shannon Wendt a liar just as they did to Julie Boonstra even though neither of them are, and even though Kessler didn't know enough about either of their situations to really even voice an informed opinion, much less pronounce the final word on truth. I am singling Kessler out because he has been aggressively going after private citizens who appear in these ads, which is really creepy when you think about it: A citizen of this country publicly speaks out about harm done by the government and seeks redress of grievances, and the news media attacks her for doing so. Liberals claim this is all fine because, when a citizen complains publicly, that citizen then becomes a "political operative" and is fair game for any and all forms of abuse. I am also singling Kessler out because Democrats, liberal reporters and others in the so-called "fact checker" genre are using his writing as a jumping off point for their own dishonest defenses of ObamaCare. Finally, in addition to being dishonest, Kessler's work is sloppy and uninformed. He shows no understanding of the complicated nature of health insurance and how it works in practice. He simply assumes after adding up numbers he finds on a web site that Plan A saves you this much and Plan B cost you this much, case closed, facts unassailable. The Washington Post should fire him. But at the very least, no one else should be citing him as authoritative. And yet at a time in our nation's history when citizens hurt by the state are the enemies of the state, he is being treated as the ultimate source of truth. That is sad.