Another prominent Washington Post staffer is exiting the paper. WaPo Fact Checker Glenn Kessler said on Monday he was leaving the “best job in journalism” after accepting a buyout offer from the outlet that has been his home for the last 27 years.
Kessler, in a LinkedIn post, said he would have liked to continue scrutinizing politicians but the “financial considerations were impossible to dismiss.” He said he plans on writing more books following his last day at the Post, which is on Friday.
Kessler started working at the Post in 1998 and became its Fact Checker in 2011, a position in which he called out President Trump on a number of occasions. Even the Fact Checker was fallible, though; he notably ripped outlets that covered President Biden’s cognitive decline last year, saying they were falling for “cheapfake” videos that helped push a “false narrative”; a month after Kessler’s story, President Biden dropped out of the race in July 2024.
“So what’s next for The Fact Checker? I’m not sure,” Kessler posted on LinkedIn.
He continued: “As many people at The Post know, I tried to arrange a short-term contract that would have given the editors time to find a worthy successor and allow me to train him or her. I didn’t want The Post to have a gap in fact-checking coverage during this fraught period in U.S. history. But we couldn’t work out an agreement. (Okay, so I buried the lede.)”
A Washington Post rep did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on the now-vacated position.
Kessler joins a growing list of high-profile WaPo writers to leave the paper in recent months. Columnists Catherine Rampell and Jonathan Capehart accepted buyouts last week, and Dave Jorgenson, WaPo’s “TikTok Guy,” also announced he was leaving the paper.
The recent departures follow WaPo owner Jeff Bezos’ revamping of the paper’s opinion section to focus on “two key pillars”: personal liberties and free markets earlier this year.
A number of prominent WaPo staffers left soon after, including opinion editor David Shipley, who resigned immediately. Columnist Ruth Marcus, who had been at the paper for 40 years, quit weeks later after she said a column “expressing concern” over Bezos’ new direction for the opinion section was “spiked.”
A person familiar with the newsroom told TheWrap last week it would not be surprising to see more people leave the paper this week, as it is offering buyouts to those who do not “feel aligned” with the paper’s “reinvention” through the end of July.
