WaPo takes on Tom Cotton again – loses, and is forced to issue another correction

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In another embarrassing setback for The Washington Post, it was forced to issue another correction while attempting to “gotcha” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) with a fact check.

When Cotton predicted that convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would receive a Covid-19 stimulus check, The Washington Post tried to pounce, claiming that this was just another example of Republican polemics and conspiracy theories.

Cotton had Tweeted in March about a vote to prevent prisoners from receiving stimulus checks, disparaging Democrats who had voted against it:


This had prompted Glenn Kessler, fact-checker at the Washington Post, to award Cotton with two “Pinocchios,” presumably a milder form of calling him an outright liar.

Then, it turned out Tsarnaev had received a stimulus payment, and outraged officials demanded that it be placed in the trust fund he owes towards the victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing – currently at $101 million.

This forced Kessler to issue a correction, conceding the point, and saying that Cotton was now only 1 “Pinocchio,” the lowest grade of liar in the Post’s lexicon:

This isn’t the first time the Post has had to admit defeat to Cotton after scourging him for suggesting that the Covid-19 pandemic was started as a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Now that the press has warmed up to the idea somewhat, and reports from the Wall Street Journal that Wuhan scientists had become seriously ill with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019, just before the pandemic started making news, Kessler was forced to issue a correction.

Twitter took a moment to relentlessly mock Kessler:

One noted that at the time it was written, Kessler and the Post essentially were trying to prove something that was not falsifiable:

Mike Cernovich jumped in to ask why the Post hadn’t fact-checked Democrats like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in an easily falsifiable, false claim:

Nobody knows the future for certain, but it would be a reasonable guess that given the credibility of The Washington Post in general and Kessler in particular, it is likely to include more corrections.

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