PolitiFact founder Bill Adair joined C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Thursday to discuss his new book, “Beyond the Big Lie,” and was pressed on which political party in the U.S. actually lies more.
Host Pedro Echevarria played a clip of Adair on the show back in 2012, where a caller asked him, “Isn’t it true, I read recently in Nation magazine that PolitiFact and your nearest competitor had listed in general the veracity of statements of Republicans versus Democrats, and that almost, almost seven out of ten of the ‘Pants on Fire’ or the ‘Three Pinocchios’ were given to the Republicans, as was the Democrats. Democrats lied almost as much, but the lies were a lot smaller. So isn’t that true?”
“You know, I can honestly say I don’t keep score,” Adair replied to the caller at the time.
“That’s what you said in 2012. So fill in the rest of it,” Echevarria pressed.
“Well, I was lying. We did keep score and we didn’t keep score by party, but we kept score and still do, PolitiFact does, by individual. And so you could easily look through the prominent Republicans and compare them to the prominent Democrats and see that Brian was right,” Adair replied, adding:
But I lied and I lied because I was trying to show that we were impartial. And this is really important in Washington journalism to show that you’re not taking sides. The challenge with fact-checking is that it is kind of a rough and tumble form of journalism, and you are making calls. And that’s important. That is what political fact-checking is all about.
But in doing so, we see this unmistakable pattern and we talk about that in a bit. But, I and this is true for other fact-checkers didn’t answer that question when I got asked that question when I gave speeches and on other TV appearances, because I was trying to show my impartiality that we were truly nonpartisan in in what we did. And and that is still a core principle of PolitiFact, that it looks at both parties equally. It looks at each statement individually. But this pattern is unmistakable.
And now that I no longer work for PolitiFact, that I’m a faculty member at Duke, I can talk about it freely. And I think as a nation, I think we need to talk about it because the the fact that there are so many lies coming from the Republicans, it’s really affecting our discourse.
Watch the clip above and full episode here via C-SPAN.
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