00:00Glenn Kessler, who worked as a fact-checking columnist at The Washington Post for 28 years, has left that job and joined Iris Stoll, founder of TheEditors.com, to talk about his long-story career at The Post, what he got wrong, and the changes he believes news outlets should make to their coverage to appeal to more readers or viewers.
00:21Kessler said he was on a mission to reinstate the ombudsman at The Post, which didn't work out in his favor.
00:27An ombudsman is not part of the regular editorial staff and is usually independent.
00:32It's someone who acts as a mediator between the news organization and its audience, usually providing unbiased assessments of the outlet's performance.
00:40Newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times used to employ ombudsmen.
00:44However, they've been phased out over the years.
00:47When speaking with Stoll, Kessler said an ombudsman could help explain to readers why certain stories are selected,
00:52why stories are written the way they are, and to help admit when mistakes are made in articles.
00:58He recalled the time that he wrote an article, a skeptical perception, he called it,
01:02on a 10-year-old girl crossing state lines to receive an abortion just two weeks after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
01:08Originally, the story was picked up by the right-leaning media as an example of this was a falsehood,
01:16and then the story was confirmed that it actually did happen.
01:19I updated my fact check, but I got a lot of negative blowback from readers for having done this in the first place.
01:29And I felt if there were an ombudsman in place, they could have laid it out, explained how the story got written,
01:37why it got written, how was it edited, the mistakes that were made.
01:42There was also discussion about whether fact checkers were too quick to dismiss the lab leak theory
01:46about where the COVID-19 virus came from, and whether they wrongly labeled it as false
01:51before enough evidence was available.
01:53While at the Post, Kessler edited a piece titled,
01:56Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab?
02:00It's doubtful.
02:01Kessler added the, it's doubtful part to the article.
02:04He said that the original fact checks about the origins of the coronavirus
02:07were mainly aimed at debunking the idea that it was deliberately engineered as a biological weapon.
02:13Looking back, he calls this an infinite regret.
02:16But one of the reporters on the piece came up to me the next day and said,
02:19I think you made a real mistake by putting it's doubtful here.
02:23Because I'm uncertain where it stands, and you framed it in a way that made it seem more definitive
02:31than what we came up with.
02:34That's on me.
02:35You know, I screwed up, and to my, and I, she recently left the Washington Post to go to another place,
02:42and in my goodbye remarks, I mentioned, like, this explains why you should always listen to Sarah,
02:47because she's right, and I was completely wrong about this.
02:50He and Stoll also talked about left-leaning versus right-leaning coverage and the difference
02:55between news and editorial.
02:57He encourages people in today's media environment to diversify their news feeds.
03:01I personally learn more from people I disagree with than people I agree with.
03:06For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan.
03:08If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com.
03:17Hello, everybody.
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