In the WSJ, James Taranto discussed Glenn Kessler's departure from the Washington Post in language that also describes the Interpreter. Taranto points out that Kessler at least had a "flicker of self-awareness," which we've seen recently by some of the Interpreters.
But overall, the Interpreter's "opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity," also adopts a "new logical fallacy—the appeal to groupthink, or argumentum ad consensum pecoris."
Taranto refers to The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org as the consensus makers. When you read this, think of the parallel organizations: The Interpreter, FAIRLDS, and Book of Mormon Central.
... in Mr. Kessler’s telling, executive editor Matt Murray had an inkling that something was wrong: “A couple of editors suggested Murray had a vague, unarticulated concern about The Fact Checker—something he had never raised with me. He’s been on a push to eliminate anything opinionated in the news pages, but facts aren’t opinions.” (Messrs. Lewis and Murray both held equivalent positions at the Journal in recent years.)
So thorough was Mr. Kessler’s self-deception that he literally didn’t know what he was doing. True enough, “facts aren’t opinions.” His columns contained facts, but so does good opinion journalism. Mr. Kessler fails to see what is in front of his nose—that his assignment of “Pinocchios” isn’t a fact but a pure opinion, crudely and childishly expressed.
In his Post swan song, five days before his Substack premiere, Mr. Kessler acknowledged and dismissed this line of criticism: “Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers—The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org—reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95 percent of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way.”
Yes, “some” might say that, and Mr. Kessler’s nodding to the point shows a flicker of self-awareness. At the same time, he manages to invent a new logical fallacy—the appeal to groupthink, or argumentum ad consensum pecoris. One might also describe it as an appeal to empty authority.
In emphasizing this uniformity, Mr. Kessler acknowledges something else: that the product he was selling under that “marquee brand” was indistinguishable from that of his competitors. His defense against accusations of subjectivity and bias is that his work was unoriginal.
