Poynter: “The Washington Post Fact Checker is leaving the field. After close to 15 years of fact-checking, Glenn Kessler took a buyout as part of the Post’s recent newsroom overhaul. Kessler’s work helped rejuvenate fact-checking journalism in the United States, along with organizations like PolitiFact (owned by Poynter) and FactCheck.org. Kessler elevated fact-checking to a regular feature of the Post’s political culture with his signature “Pinocchio” rating system as a fun shorthand for measuring political dishonesty. During his tenure, Kessler became best known for his meticulous tracking of President Donald Trump’s false and misleading claims, documenting more than 30,000 statements during Trump’s first term — a count that became a widely repeated metric of Trump’s relationship to truth. That work culminated in the 2020 book “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth,” co-authored with Post colleagues Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly. Kessler’s departure has prompted him to assess both the Post’s institutional problems (chronicled in a candid Substack post) and the fact-checking field’s declining fortunes, particularly the loss of tech platform backing. I wanted to speak with Kessler on how the political landscape has evolved during his tenure, the institutional pressures facing fact-checkers today, and what his departure means for accountability journalism at a time when false claims spread faster than ever. Our conversation touched on everything from Trump’s normalization of political lying to the economics of sustaining fact-checking operations in an increasingly polarized media environment…”