In ‘Beyond the Big Lie,’ Bill Adair breaks down the data, damage and solutions to the epidemic of political lies

By Catherine Komp, Engagement Director

For decades, Bill Adair’s days and nights have been filled with a quest to promote truth and squash lies. The longtime journalist founded PolitiFact in 2007 as a solution to a news and information gap: holding politicians accountable for their statements and helping their constituents get accurate information about the policies and decisions affecting their lives.

PolitiFact steadily expanded to meet the need, including launching a North Carolina bureau in 2016 (now a partnership with WRAL) and recently serving a critical role in debunking disinformation about Helene and the upcoming election

Despite the efforts of PolitiFact and other fact checkers, lying has only gotten worse, says Adair. His new book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy,” makes a case for journalists and voters to call it out more frequently. 

“I believe that retreating to the semantic safety of the past cloaks the serious problem of lying that is threatening our political discourse,” writes Adair.

Adair and his research team tapped into massive troves of data about political lying, from PolitFact, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and FactCheck.org, to prove something he’s known for over a decade: Republicans lie far more often than Democrats. But “Beyond the Big Lie” is not just a quantitative look at the problem. Adair weaves personal narratives throughout the book, exploring the real world consequences of political lies and demonstrating how they threaten our health, safety and democracy. 

As Adair has sifted through the lies of others, he’s also sat with his own lie to a caller on C-SPAN who asked “Which party lies more?” His new book explores this ethical lapse and why it’s time to come clean to Brian from Michigan and the larger public.

NC Local had the chance to chat with Bill Adair about “Beyond the Big Lie,” the research and personal stories behind it, how journalists should approach political lies and the need for more fact-checkers. 

NC Local: You begin the book by sharing your own lie to a caller on C-SPAN, Brian from Michigan, about whether PolitiFact kept score of how many times Democrats versus Republicans lie. Was there a moment when you realized this was something that you needed to get out to the public?

Bill Adair: Yes. When I started working on the book, I made the decision that I needed to leave PolitiFact completely after the 2020 election. I had been working with PolitiFact North Carolina and the team at WRAL-TV up until then, and I realized that there was no way I could have the freedom to say the things I needed to say while still doing that.

So, I let PolitiFact and WRAL know that I was doing that. Starting in early 2021, I taught a class called “Lying in Politics,” which was, I should make clear, not a how-to class. It was to study lying in politics, and the whole goal of the class was to help me figure out what different elements I wanted in the book.

I had a series of people speak to the class, everyone from David Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress, to Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, to people who had been Democratic operatives. It gave me a sense of what people would say about lying in politics.

About that time, I realized I needed to come clean about the data I had as PolitiFact editor, and now as a professor at Duke, that could shed some light on this—and I knew what it was going to show. So, I asked one of my students to take on the most horrible task, which was watching me on C-SPAN.

This student spent hours watching my C-SPAN videos, looking for any time I had answered that question: which party lies more? Because it was actually a question I got fairly often. So, the student found an appearance from 2012 when a caller from Michigan called in and said, “Hey, Mr. Adair, I read in The Nation that PolitiFact and the Washington Post have found, when you add them up, that Republicans lie more. Is that true?” And I lied. I said, “Oh, Brian, we don’t keep score.” Well, that was a lie because PolitiFact did keep score. That was actually one of my innovations in starting PolitiFact that we had a Truth-O-Meter and rated claims on it. (Editor’s note: hear Brian’s question & Bill’s response at 11:13 of this video.)

You could add up all of the “False” ratings and “Pants on Fire” ratings that different politicians had and compare them with other politicians. We didn’t total them by party, but we did total them by politician, so it wasn’t hard to add up prominent Republicans and compare them to prominent Democrats.

And so, Brian from Michigan was right—yes, Republicans lied more. And so I lied on C-SPAN. I was probably the first person in the history of C-SPAN to lie on C-SPAN, I’m sure. And I lied because I wanted to appear impartial. And I was impartial. I approached my fact checks, as the PolitiFact staff does today, with complete neutrality.

We look at the facts, we assess the claim, and we issue a rating. So, my motives were understandable, but I lied. I thought that was a good way to begin the book—to frame both the challenge that fact-checkers have but also, more importantly, this imbalance, this big disparity between the two parties, which I really think is a serious problem for our democracy and a big challenge for journalists.

NC Local: How did you go about your research for this book? You had a lot of students you were working with, but did you also use big spreadsheets to sort out the various levels of lying? Did you use AI to analyze lies? 

Bill Adair: Here at Duke, we worked with Google to develop a standard that fact-checkers around the world use to tag their fact checks. It’s called ClaimReview. When fact-checkers create a fact check, they put this tag on it, which allows Google and other tech companies to find it because it’s embedded in the webpage.

That also creates a database. You can download all of this ClaimReview data and have a summary of all the fact checks by the Washington Post, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org. The value of that for researchers is that they can pull all of the fact checks for certain politicians, certain members of a party, whatever. Party is not actually indicated on these, so we had to go in and do that ourselves. So we took this data, enriched it with some things like party, and cleaned it up. I had really great students who did that work.

Then one thing we did, which I think showed our conservatism so to speak, in using the data. We pulled Donald Trump out of the data because we said, “He is fact-checked so often, and he gets so many ‘False’ and ‘Pants on Fire’ ratings from PolitiFact, so many ‘Four Pinocchios’ from the Washington Post. Let’s pull him out and see if there is still a noticeable difference between the parties.” And yes, there was. Even with Donald Trump removed, there was still this overwhelming pattern. So that was really interesting.

I thought that was going to be the book: like, “Hey, Bill’s Book of Lying Statistics.” Well, there’s a lot more to it. Ultimately, those statistics became just a couple of pages in a book that really looks at how and why politicians lie. I ended up really getting interested in the stories about political lies. The book, as you mentioned at the beginning, is a collection of some analysis, a little bit of data, but mostly these really interesting stories about people who were lied about or were victims of lies, including a woman named Nina Jankowicz, a guy who fell for election lies and then stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and a state legislator in Arizona who cast the deciding vote for the Republicans about whether to pass a bill allowing the arrest of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a bill being pushed by Trump.

So to me, those stories were the most fascinating because they’re about politicians making the decisions to lie and the effects of that.

NC Local: You write that political lying is an epidemic and has serious impacts on our health, safety and, of course, democracy. How has it gotten worse over time?

Bill Adair: I launched PolitiFact in 2007, and at the time, I thought lying was a problem but not the serious problem it is today. So what’s changed? Social media and partisan media allow for the frictionless spread of lying in ways that just weren’t possible 20 years ago.

You also have a willingness by politicians now, particularly on the right, to spread lies about things that would have been unthinkable in the past—lies about an election in ways that, if you’d told people in the ‘80s that a party’s top candidate for president was going to, before the election, raise doubts about the election process, people would be amazed.

And partisan media is a huge factor in this.

NC Local: There is a bit of a shift in some news outlets starting to use different language, including the word “lie.” You include a really helpful taxonomy of lying in your book, laying out different types and severity of lies. Could you talk a bit about the wordsmithing used, for example “half-truths” and “distortions” and when should journalists opt for the word “lie” instead?

Bill Adair: I think there’s a need to be precise. When I started PolitiFact, we were very careful not to use the word “lie.” In fact, PolitiFact to this day is still very careful about it, only using it once a year for the “Lie of the Year” selection, which we started around 2010. There are purists who believe journalists should not use the word unless they truly know the speaker is aware the thing they’re saying is false. And that’s where I used to be.

But as I indicate in the book, I’ve loosened up about that because I think people use the term more liberally. I think “lies” has come to be pretty synonymous with “falsehoods.” I don’t think when people say, “Oh, there’s a lot of lies out there,” they mean every single falsehood was a premeditated thing the speaker knew was wrong.

So I’ve loosened up about it. I still generally avoid using it for an individual statement unless the person has done it repeatedly despite debunking—like Trump and the lie about immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Well, that’s a lie. There’s no question about that. He knows it’s been debunked, and he continues to repeat it. He doesn’t care.

I think it’s perfectly fine to call that individual statement a lie. Others, I’d show more caution for an individual statement, But in a poll I quote in the book, the public essentially agreed that the term could be used more generally.

NC Local: You also highlight that there’s a simple question that journalists and voters rarely ask politicians which is: “Why do you lie?”

Bill Adair: Yes. This question became central in writing the book, asking politicians and political operatives, “Why do you lie?” Usually, they’d deny it, a few would acknowledge they told a lie. But what I realized in talking to them was they had never been asked that before. No journalist had asked that question. Even me, the fact-checking guy—I had never asked it.

Because we’re afraid. As journalists, we’re afraid to confront politicians with that, often because we’re not sure we quite have the goods, or the word scares us. And I think we need to do it more. I think we do need to confront people more and say, “Why are you lying about this?”

NC Local: What impact do you think that would have?

I think it would have a positive impact. Although initially it would rattle them because they’re never asked that. But I think they don’t want to be embarrassed, and if they were asked that question in television or radio interviews, it would have an impact about lying in the future. I don’t think it would stop it entirely, but they’d certainly be more mindful.

NC Local: You mentioned Trump and the lies about Haitian immigrants. There’s so much that politicians have lied about, but that one, especially, is incredibly harmful to communities. Did you find any evidence on how lying contributes to stoking fear, bigotry, and prejudice? Is this a common subgroup of political lying?

Bill Adair: Unfortunately, it is. And let’s think about an example here from the last 20 years: Obama’s birth. This was one where, clearly with race as the backdrop, a group of people—originally on the fringe, and then later Donald Trump—passed along the lie that Obama was born in Kenya. The implication being, “he’s not one of us.” And so that lie spread and spread. It was fascinating to watch because the Obama campaign, before the Trump campaign took it and it was just on the fringe, tried to ignore it.

And when I was PolitiFact editor, and I’d be in touch with the Obama campaign and say, “Hey, what do you have on this?” They’d be like, “Don’t take that seriously.” They didn’t want to give it, as they used to say, oxygen. I said I thought they should respond to it and do things like release the long-form birth certificate, which was one of the pieces of evidence that was supposedly part of the “mystery,” even though it wasn’t a mystery. They finally realized, after he got elected, they better put this thing to rest. So Obama himself went to his attorney, Bob Bauer, and said, “All right, we gotta squash this thing.” So they sent a lawyer to Hawaii to get the long-form birth certificate and brought it back.

One morning, Obama trots out to the White House press room and holds up the long form birth certificate and was like, “Here it is. It’s real. I’m real. I was born in Hawaii. And all these things are lies.” But they should have done that earlier. 

Now, you asked about race—that was all about race. Did it solve the problem? If you look at the polls at the time, there was definitely an increase in people who believed he was born in the U.S. after that, but it didn’t win over everyone. The remaining people probably wanted to believe he was born in Kenya and probably would never be won over.

But it was all about race. And just to get to your fear question, that’s what we see with these lies about immigration: “people are coming over the border to steal from you, kill you, rape you.” That’s the use of fear combined with lying that is just really terrible. 

NC Local: We’re in this election season, and journalists are anticipating a lot of lies and mis- and disinformation. How do you recommend newsrooms address that without platforming or perpetuating lies?

Bill Adair: That’s a great question. I think that you don’t need to fact-check every ridiculous claim. We had a rule at PolitiFact that a claim had to be by a prominent person, getting a substantial audience, and something people would wonder “Really? Is that true?”

But I do think fact-checking is not just for fact-checkers. We’ve seen some great progress on this. It used to be that news reporters didn’t want to do fact-checking because they felt it might compromise their ability to have relationships with their sources, their sources might get mad at them. But lately, there’s much more willingness on the part of reporters covering the news to say, “Hey, if there’s something false that I hear while reporting, I’m going to say that in my story.” We call it an embedded fact check, meaning the fact check is embedded in the news story. And you’re seeing so much more of this. It used to be pretty rare. When I first wrote about it in 2019, it was a rare thing and we were like “Spotted in the wild, embedded fact checking.” And now it’s pretty routine. So that’s good. And it doesn’t need to take up much space or use a Truth-O-Meter ruling. Just “so and so said this at a campaign appearance, we checked it out, it’s not true, there’s no evidence to support it.” Maybe one more sentence. It doesn’t even interrupt the flow of the story. I think news reporters need to continue that positive trend and do it more and more.

NC Local: Especially finding the resources and support to use it with voter guides, which many are using right now to make their voting plan. 

Bill Adair: Exactly.

NC Local: You recently had an event with Nina Jankowicz, one of the people whose experiences facing an onslaught of political lies is woven through your book. What was that like, having a conversation with her and sharing this extremely difficult time in public? 

Bill Adair: It was wonderful to have her here at Duke. Nina is, in many ways, the central character of my book; her story is its backbone. She was a government official who was brought in to run a coordinating group within the Department of Homeland Security called the Disinformation Governance Board—probably the worst name ever for a government agency. DHS did a terrible job explaining what the Disinformation Governance Board would do. They just leaked a notice that it was starting to Politico. So that allowed the critics, people on Fox, conservative talk radio, members of Congress, to fill the void by making things up about the board, about what it was going to do, about Nina. As a result, there were all these lies circulating on social media, on Fox. Nina was getting death threats, she was afraid she’d have to move, and at the time, she was eight months pregnant. It was just terrible. The chapters about Nina really show the human effects of political lying.

Even after the Disinformation Governance Board was canceled, DHS basically gave up because Republicans lied about it so much, Nina’s life was turned upside down. She had trouble finding work, even though she’s an expert, ironically, in disinformation. She decided to sue Fox. I won’t give away what happened, but she had a really interesting lawsuit against Fox. She took a big risk by doing that. 

Anyway, she came to Duke. It was great to see her and someone who had very much embodied what happens with lies—and showed that these aren’t victimless crimes. When politicians lie, there can be real effects for real people.

NC Local: You end with some solutions. And these seem like they could be easy to get off the ground if there was support. If you were to start a campaign to adopt them, where would you start? The “Pledge against lying?” “Truthfulness badge?”

Bill Adair: Sometimes, when I talk to colleagues, I hear a lot of pessimism about lying, like “Oh, my God, we’re all doomed.” And I do think ultimately, it’s going to take voters caring about this. But until now, I don’t think we focused that much on lying so I hope my book will get people thinking about lying and talking about it.

My solutions involve a couple different approaches. One is more fact-checking. Right now fact checking isn’t doing the trick because it isn’t reaching the people it needs to reach. They’ve been told they can’t trust the media and particularly fact checkers. Also, there’s no fact-checking in 25 of the 50 states, so there’s these gaps where politicians can say anything they want. So one part of the solution is more fact-checking, if we can get more funding for it. That’s the baseline part of it.

And then there’s the idea of how do we change politicians’ behavior? Can that be done? I actually think it can and it’s all about incentives. Politicians lie because they think there’s an incentive. If they lie they basically score political points. So how do we change that incentive? 

You have to step back and think, what do they care about? They care about reaching voters, and they do that through advertising. Could we turn the dials on advertising to create incentives to tell the truth and disincentives for lying? We could actually if we had a few people at tech companies, media companies, advertising companies, adjust their rates. They would have to differentiate their rates, charge more to politicians who have worse records for lying, charge politicians who tell the trust more, according to fact checkers.

Now there are challenges with this you’d have to figure out. One, you need enough fact checks for each politician that you could make a reasonable judgment, politicians would probably complain, so you’d need to adjust some things. You’d need to get more fact checking from conservative publications. There are some. The Dispatch does some good fact checking but I’d love to see more of that. 

Another one you mentioned is the pledge against lying. Republicans love a pledge. They took a pledge to not raise taxes (most of them). The shorthand for it is The Pledge, administered by Americans for Tax Reform. And most Republicans in Congress have signed it. What if we had a similar pledge to not lie? Sounds like a winner to me. If we could find someone to run it like Grover Norquist, who runs the tax pledge, we could get politicians to commit to truthfulness.

I’m not saying these ideas would solve the problem entirely, but we need to start somewhere, and that, plus people who care about this issue, could begin to make a difference.

NC Local: We’re going to wrap up here, but I’m super curious— have you heard from Brian from Michigan yet?

Bill Adair: I have not, but you’ll appreciate this: I have begun working on a piece, I don’t know for whom, where I’m working with my students to try to find him. One of my students found a second video where Brian from Michigan called into C-SPAN. It’s definitely him. So we’re going to keep going, see if we can narrow down the town he’s from, we have not succeeded in that yet. And then use all the tools we have as journalists to see if we can track him down so I can give him a call, apologize, and send him a book.

Related reading & resources

  • Watch Bill Adair discuss “Beyond the Big Lie” and take calls on C-SPAN as well as his appearance on The Daily Show
  • Learn more about the ClaimReview & Duke Reporters’ Lab’s global Fact Checking database
  • Find fact-checking in Spanish with Factchequeado
  • Use Scicheck to find resources debunking mis- and disinformation about science topics
NC Local News Workshop