Isaac Schorr at Mediaite reports former ABC News political director Mark Halperin interviewed Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler after his final “fact check.” At one point, Halperin honed in on one of Kessler's most controversial recent checks, going after the New York Post for overplaying Joe Biden meandering off to talk to a parachutist.
The GOP version of the video cut out the parachutist -- but the meandering was still obvious. (The parachutist clearly wasn't looking at the president, so was it a conversation?) The Post headline said the video was "deeply misleading."
Kessler now referred to Biden "supposedly wandering off" -- but you can watch the Italian prime minister wander after him like she'd been briefed he needed a minder. “I have said this before, that you know, fact checks are a compliment to the news coverage, not a supplement,” said Kessler before defending the Post‘s overall handling of the Biden-decline story.
Halperin pushed back: “But the power of the Pinocchios, and the power of the fact check, when you write that, people see that and say, ‘The Washington Post is saying that that video is not reflective of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.’ That’s what people take from that. They do! " The headline on the piece tagged the GOP video as "deeply misleading" -- basically, the video was False.
Halperin asked Kessler to assess how the Post overall handled the issue of Biden's mental state. Kessler claimed: "So there was a lot of effort to produce a story that would look very carefully at what seemed to be a cognitive decline. It never came together because we couldn’t get enough people on the record." The sources closest to Biden were the most clamped-down, but that's no excuse. There is the obvious.
Halperin shot back: “Do you know the moment where Joe Biden spoke to a dead congresswoman [Jackie Walorski] at a public event? Are you familiar with that moment?” he inquired. Kessler said yes, so Halperin pressed: “Okay, what kind of sourcing did you need to say Joe Biden was suffering cognitive decline? Did you see him trailing off regularly? What kind of sourcing was needed?”
KESSLER: I’m telling you, there was a lot of effort to produce the story, you know, you know, that you are asking for, and it didn’t come together. That is my understanding. I was not in the meetings, and yes, in retrospect, one could say, “God, that was a real missed opportunity.” It’s also difficult when you’re taking on the President of the United States and saying, and you want to say, “Okay, we think there’s a cognitive decline and we wanna get people on the record as actually saying this.” Because it’s a very serious accusation. And you know that on the Left, there’s all this chatter about Trump’s cognitive issues. Now, you know-
HALPERIN: But Glenn, when you write a column that says, “the RNC is producing misleading video because Joe Biden wandered off and talked to paratroopers,” that is taking the credibility and power of you, the Fact Checker column, and The Washington Post and saying, in effect, not “this one little thing is wrong, but, oh, let’s remind you that he talked to a dead congresswoman.” You are saying in that column to any normal reader, The Washington Post is saying the chatter of that cognitive decline is made up. That’s what it’s saying.
Kessler still refused to acknowledge his "cheapfake" critique looked bad in retrospect: "We were looking specifically at that video and letting, and we showed the full context of the video you showed he was talking to-, and I recently reviewed that column because I got subject of a nasty editorial in The New York Post. I feel, you may think I’m crazy and your viewers may think I’m crazy, but I think in the context in which I wrote that, that column still stands up even though we now know that Joe Biden had issues."
