Does the Washington Post employ fact checkers?

[Updated]

Via Matt Yglesias, I see that Kay Bailey Hutchinson has an op-ed in the Washington Post claiming that Barack Obama has a faceless “virtual army of czars” and that few of them have actual titles while holding “unknown levels of power”. Amanda Terkel shows that Hutchinson is, in fact, lying.

As far as the WaPo goes, this is sadly par for the course of late. As Yglesias says, the paper is falling down on the job and abdicating its responsibilities to its readers:

What I do care about is The Washington Post. This is a newspaper. They charge people money to buy it. The idea is that if you pay money in order to buy it, you’ll become better informed. But they regularly publish material in their opinion pages that demonstrates a total disregard for this function. The article in question manages to not so much as mention that all of our recent presidents have employed “czars.” I find it completely impossible to believe that Washington Post editors are unaware that George W. Bush employed “czars.” I find it completely impossible to believe that Washington Post editors have completely forgotten the administration of a man who was still president as recently as nine months ago. And I find it completely impossible to believe Washington Post editors don’t grasp the relevance of this fact to assessing the credibility of Hutchison’s complaint. Her use of phrases such as “unprecedented” to describe Obama’s czar-related conduct, combined with the total lack of context, is transparently designed to mislead the audience. And the Washington Post decided to print it!

Indeed. Time for Andy Alexander to write another apology to the readers.

[Updated] The WaPo’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, has a kind of flip response to a reader question about the Hutchinson op-ed:

Why should readers trust the Post?: Howie, once again your paper printed a column in which somebody is either ill-informed or just flat out lying to your readers. And of all the stupid reasons why, it because today’s modern conservative elites are so well-educated they believe “Czars” were part of the USSR.

Can we just for the record point out that maybe just one of these people (The Drug Czar, a title used since I was a kid in the 70’s) has ever been referred to as a “Czar” and that each of these Executive Branch consultants has a formal title?

And, while we are at it, that there is nothing particularly remarkable about having 30 such positions, some so temporary that they have already conducted their business and gone back to their day jobs?

Howard Kurtz: It would help if people would cite the specific columns or stories they’re referring to. But I think there’s a general understanding that “czars” is journalistic shorthand. My first czar (leaving aside a cursory study of Russian history) was President Ford’s so-called energy czar.