FUNNY HOW THESE “FACT CHECKS” ONLY WORK IN ONE DIRECTION: Washington Post “Fact Checker” Was “Completely Wrong” on Wuhan Lab-Leak Headline, He Says.

Glenn Kessler, the fact-checking columnist who recently concluded a 28-year career at the Washington Post and recently launched the BY GLENN KESSLER Substack, joined me yesterday to talk about some of the issues raised in his article “Why I left the Washington Post.”

I asked him about the erosion of popular trust in fact-checking by elite institutions. One topic that came up along the way was whether fact-checkers prematurely declared false the “lab leak” theory of the Covid-19 virus’s origins.

Kessler was admirably forthright in acknowledging that he’d gotten wrong a Washington Post headline on that topic.

“I screwed up…I was completely wrong,” he told me, speaking of what he called his “infinite regret” at a headline casting doubt on the lab-leak theory.

“Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect. And when you’ve got a title like ‘the fact checker,’ when you make a mistake, people notice. So, you know, you’ve got to own it,” he said.

Five years after getting it wrong (because getting it right would have benefitted the doubleplusungood crimethink people who publicly said it was a lab leak right from the start), and after Kessler left the Post. That’s the very opposite of “owning it.”

As Bruce Carroll wrote in February of 2021, “One must ask, however, when does Sen. Tom Cotton get his apology from those who for a year characterized him as a conspiracy kook for asking the right questions?”

Related:

You know you are hitting a nerve when you start exposing the ruling class and the guy across from you is so triggered he keeps trying to talk over you! pic.twitter.com/p5hALaWeNd

— Johnny Midnight ⚡️ (@its_The_Dr) August 14, 2025