Beyond the Big Lie

August 19, 2024
“Republicans lie more and they lie worse,” according to this unbalanced debut from Adair, creator of the fact-checking site PolitiFact. While Adair notes Democrats also lie, he focuses mainly on Republican misrepresentations, which he says PolitiFact knows are more frequent and serious based on an internal tally kept by the organization. These include lies about immigration and crime, as well as “the Big Lie” of Donald Trump’s 2020 election denialism. Adair floats anodyne theories about why politicians lie (to gain political advantage) and why lies work (because partisan media validates them), and lambasts the Trump-era lying of Mike Pence, a former friend. Adair’s discussion is weakened by a frustrating lack of perceptiveness around Democrat mistruths; he devotes three entire chapters to the 2022 furor over the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board and its head, Nina Jankowicz, tagging Republicans with firing a “heavy artillery of lies” when they forced Jankowicz to resign by accusing her of spreading misinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop. This feels like an overly partisan centerpiece case, given that the laptop is an incredibly murky story in which no one involved seems not to have shaded the truth, including Jankowicz, who, while clearly scapegoated, did make statements validating the widely propagated (and as yet unproven) Democrat talking point that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It makes for an oddly myopic view of what constitutes lying.

October 1, 2024
How politicians are stretching the truth more than they used to. When Adair, founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, was bureau chief for theSt. Petersburg Times, he instituted national fact-checking using his Truth-O-Meter. Recent events, he says, show that lying threatens our democracy, endangers our health, and cripples our discourse. Leaning left, the book is full of excellent examples, facts, and statistics. He begins by discussing in detail a 2022 Department of Homeland Security release about a new organization created to coordinate its efforts to combat disinformation and how it went horribly bad after right-wing media attacked it as a governmental Orwellian Ministry of Truth. Adair's detailed taxonomy of lying differentiates its severity, type, and technique. Besides Bill Clinton, the author's lying hall of fame includes the "nation's most prolific and damaging liar," Donald Trump. Adair argues that when a political lie is created, campaigns must debunk it quickly and often. With the rise of so many fact-checkers, it soon became clear that Republicans "lied more--and they lied worse." Former Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota tells Adair that, in the author's words, "lying has been part of the Republican ethos since the early 1990s," beginning with Newt Gingrich. Adair asserts that a "citizen movement to hold politicians accountable for lying" has some promise, concluding with some ideas for helping reduce lying, such as politicians making public pledges to stop it, as well as lowering ad rates and offering more debate time for truth tellers. A sobering and bleak assessment of lies in politics.

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