Whatever Zinger you do, I'm going to say, this is misleading.

Three Pinocchio's.

Yeah, what if I just said, yeah, he's a fact checker for the Washington Post,

and then you just said, this needs context?

He sucks.

That's actually additional context. He sucks. That's actually additional context.

I think that's a good bit. I think we should do it.

Wait, we need something for the, okay, we need something for the, we need something

for the music to kick in.

Mm-hmm. All I know is that if I say he sucks that needs zero Pinocchio's or something like that. Or should we just, or should we just include this entire thing?

And then the music eventually kicks in. So this is an episode about the institution of fact-checking and our little entry point is Glenn Kessler the Washington Post fact-checker. He starts as a hard news reporter for News Day.

He then becomes like a White House kind of foreign policy reporter,

Access Journalism guy. I did not know this when I started researching this, but the

history of fact-checking kind of is the history of Glenn Kessler. No one had ever thought to check a fact

before Glenn came around. Is this true? Fact checking really gets kind of

invented in 2004. There's a speech by Zell Miller at the Republican National

Convention in 2004 where he just goes after Carrie's war record and says he

voted against this military spending and he just goes after him as like a

soft on military guy and it's just egregious like just lies and half truths all the way

through and Kessler pitches to his editors I want to write a front page debunker of like all of the false claims that you heard the other night.

And this starts to be seen, you know, as the internet is starting to take over news, as the information

environment is changing, this starts to be seen as like actually a really important

...