Kessler now admits that a headline ruling the lab-leak theory ‘doubtful’ was a mistake, but he still defends the article itself.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we recap ex-Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler’s recent mea culpa on his Covid-19 lab leak reporting, and cover more media misses.
On ‘Fact-Checking’ the ‘Doubtful’ Lab-Leak Theory
Former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has us asking, “What year is it?”
Five years on from his infamous “reporting” on the Covid-19 lab leak theory, Kessler has finally acknowledged he got it wrong . . . kind of.
Kessler, having recently accepted a buyout from the Washington Post, participated in an interview with theeditors.com founder Ira Stoll, who questioned Kessler about conservatives’ dwindling trust in fact-checkers, and pointed to Kessler’s own 2020 fact-check as an example.
“Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful,” Kessler and his team reported at the time.
Now, Kessler is still defending the piece overall, but acknowledged he was wrong to add the words “it’s doubtful” to the headline.
“One of the reporters on the piece came up to me the next day and said, ‘I think you made a real mistake by putting ‘it’s doubtful’ here. Because I’m uncertain where it stands, and you framed it in a way that made it seem more definitive than what we came up with,’” Kessler said.
“That’s on me,” he added. “I screwed up. She recently left the Washington Post to go to another place. In my goodbye remarks, I mentioned, this explains why you should always listen to Sarah, because she’s right, and I was completely wrong about this.”
Still, Kessler defended the overarching substance of the article, claiming it was mostly focused on the idea that Covid-19 was a bioweapon, rather than whether the virus came from nature or a lab – despite the title specifically referencing the idea that it was “accidentally released from a Wuhan lab.”
“It’s the headline. The piece itself. . .” Kessler said.
“People only remember the headline,” Stoll said.
“Like I said, that’s on me,” Kessler said.
In the body of the article, the “fact-checkers” claimed that scientific evidence at the time “strongly” supported the theory that Covid-19 came from nature. “Too many unexpected coincidences” would have been needed for the lab-leak theory to be plausible. It did acknowledge, however, that the Chinese government was unwilling to offer more information on the theory.
Despite what he says now about the content and intent of the piece, Kessler infamously told Senator Ted Cruz in 2020 that it was “virtually impossible” for Covid-19 to have come from a lab.
“I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves,” Kessler wrote in a post on X.
One year later, Kessler wrote in a new fact-check that the lab-leak theory “suddenly became credible” after new evidence emerged.
“The Trump administration also sought to highlight the lab scenario but generally could only point to vague intelligence. The Trump administration’s messaging was often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric that made it easier for skeptics to ignore its claims,” Kessler wrote.
The tables first began turning back in November 2021, when a declassified intelligence report revealed that the FBI had concluded with “moderate confidence” that the pandemic was started by a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Evidence has only multiplied since then — the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, came to a similar conclusion with “low confidence” in 2023, while the Biden-era CIA also assessed with “low confidence” that a lab leak is “more likely” than a natural origin, with both possibilities remaining plausible.
The Covid-19 debacle was far from Kessler’s only fact-check that left conservatives scratching their heads. In 2022, he “fact-checked” Republican comments on Democrats’ support for late-term abortions and in 2015, an NR article awarded him “one Pinnocchio” for his response to Hillary Clinton’s claim that a Democratic president would have paid down the national debt.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Daily Beast reports, “Veterans Beg Ron DeSantis to Stop Killing Them.”
The article claims Governor DeSantis is “under fire for turning against his fellow service members and letting executioners slaughter five veterans this year alone.”
The article pays no mind to the fact that the veterans being executed by the state are cold-blooded murderers.
The writing even takes issue with DeSantis’s previous claim that Florida is “the most veteran-friendly state” in the nation just because the Sunshine State has given the death penalty to veterans who have committed murder.
“Veterans statewide are now pleading with DeSantis to stop the executions of fellow former service members, all of whom devoted part of their life to protecting the country,” the article says.
While the article mentions several veterans who have either been executed or are awaiting execution, it fails to inform readers of the crimes they were convicted of.
The article was awarded a community note on X: “The @thedailybeast defends Bobby Joe Long, executed in 2019, but omits why: Long was a serial killer who raped and murdered at least 10 women in Tampa Bay in 1984. He confessed and was convicted of eight homicides, plus additional rapes and abductions.”
Two other veterans mentioned in the article were convicted of rape and murder.
“A simple trick to avoid execution in Florida is to not murder people,” said DeSantis’s communications director Alex Lanfranconi in a comment to the Daily Beast.
Media Misses
• A New York Times guest essay published this week seemingly encouraged a military coup. “We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong,” writes former Obama administration National Security Council members Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson.
“Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution,” they wrote. “Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to heed a lawless order, taking inspiration from the generals — Mark Milley and James Mattis — who resisted the uprooting of established military standards in the first Trump term.”
“But today, general officers no longer seem to see themselves as guardians of the constitutional order. It now seems clear to us that the military will not rescue Americans from Mr. Trump’s misuse of the nation’s military capabilities.”
• New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks claimed President Trump ordered Texas Governor Greg Abbott to rhetorically deploy “mustard gas” on American democracy through the state’s attempts to redistrict in Republicans’ favor. Asked if politics is nothing more than an indefinite power struggle between the two parties, Brooks said, “I understand the argument. But let’s do a little ethical experiment here. You’re in World War I. The Germans use mustard gas on civilians, and it helps them. Do you then decide, ‘Okay, we’re going to use mustard gas on civilians?'”
“What Trump ordered Abbott to do in Texas is mustard gas on our democracy. Some people would feel, ‘Okay, that was terrible. We have to fight that. It’s horrible. It’s horrible. But we’re going to fight back. It’s just — that’s war.'”
To his credit, he also blasted California Governor Gavin Newsom for his own redistricting efforts.
“Gavin Newsom is leaping into this with both legs. And, to me, there’s a moral stain that will accompany anybody who does this, because basically they are destroying our democracy,” he said. “You don’t let politicians pick voters. You let voters pick politicians.”