Glenn Kessler

WaPo Fact-Checker on Obama's Auto Bailout Claims: 'One of the Most Misleading Collections of Assertions We Have Seen'
By Tom Blumer | June 7, 2011 | 3:33 PM EDT

The educated guess here is that Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler is currently not the most popular person in the White House.

On Saturday, in a relatively rare rebuke originating from what G. Gordon Liddy has mockingly derided as "Washington's quaint little alternative newspaper" (daily circulation 741,000 in March 2005, 551,000 in March 2011), Kessler ripped into the President's claims about the auto bailout, giving him "Three Pinocchios," which in his ratings system means "Significant factual error(s) and/or obvious contradictions." Kessler found "weasel words," a "misleading figure" (actually, more), and (imagine that) a straw man.

Here are selected paragraphs from Kessler's KO (bolds are mine; internal link was in original):

... What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.

Washington Post Can’t Locate Experts Critical of Obama
By Rusty Weiss | June 21, 2009 | 11:15 PM EDT

Surprise, surprise.  Despite the overwhelming negative reaction to the President’s statements regarding the Iranian election demonstrations, Washington Post writer Glenn Kessler could not find more than one foreign policy expert that was vaguely critical.  In fact, the sole expert they did find to criticize the President added a caveat – a caveat of praise.

In the section titled ‘Approach generally praised’, Kessler writes:

The president's approach has generally been praised by foreign-policy experts, with one exception.

He then cites the lone dissenting voice (emphasis mine):