Why Republicans Lie More Than Democrats

In 2012, Bill Adair, the founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact, was on C-SPAN, and a caller on the Democratic line posed a simple question. He had read that PolitiFact had granted more “false” ratings to Republicans than Democrats. “Isn’t that true?” he asked. Adair replied, “I can honestly say I do not keep score.” As Adair now concedes, “I was lying.” PolitiFact did keep score, and the pattern was that Republicans lied more. A lot more.

Adair recounts this moment in 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. As you can tell from the subtitle, Adair is no longer reluctant to state plainly that the GOP is way ahead of the Dems when it comes to lying. A longtime reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, Adair founded PolitiFact in 2007. He stepped down as its editor in 2013 to become Knight professor of the practice of journalism and public policy at Duke University and has remained an important voice on assorted media matters. His book presents compelling tales of the ongoing war on truth, including a profile of a January 6 rioter who believed Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and an account of a Republican assault on an admirable Biden administration effort to counter disinformation. (Yes, conservatives objected to an attempt to combat the dissemination of falsehoods, apparently believing misinformation too often overlaps with Republican talking points and assertions.)

The book is an important and readable contribution to the debate on what’s happening to truth in the media these days. Adair eschews both-sidesism and demonstrates that Republicans have adopted lying as a fundamental tactic and hurl prevarications far more than Democrats. He explores why and how that has come to be. It’s a damning indictment. Last week, Adair spared me some time to talk about the book, lying in American politics, and the current state of fact-checking and the media ecosystem. I’ve slightly edited our conversation.

David Corn: This topic is personal for me. In 2004, I published a book called The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. I contended that Bush went beyond the usual spin and occasional lying in politics to which we had been accustomed, making lying a key component of his presidency. It was not just his lies about Iraq and WMDs and the purported, but not real, connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. He was lying about his policies on climate change, whom his tax cuts benefited, his plan to privatize Social Security, the stem cells controversy, the Enron scandal, and more. I made what I thought was a reasonable argument for why journalists should call lies “lies,” and I was pilloried by traditional political journalists for using the L-word. How dare I call Bush liar? Doing so, they claimed, was coarsening the political discourse. Why was there such an aversion to reporting that a politician lied or that he or she had purposefully said something clearly false?

Bill Adair: Well, you were ahead of your time, David. I think we were still in the early days of political fact-checking. That was before even fact-checkers were comfortable using the word “lie,” let alone political journalists. It took all of us a long time. So let me deal with both of those things separately. First, just in terms of calling out falsehoods, in 2003, the only dedicated organization to fact-checking was FactCheck.org, which began in December that year and was run by some great journalists at the University of Pennsylvania, led by former CNN reporter Brooks Jackson and professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson. They were doing something that made a lot of political journalists uncomfortable—calling out falsehoods by politicians.

There had been a fact-checking movement that began in the early 1990s. That was the result of veteran Washington Post journalist David Broder calling for fact-checking after George Herbert Walker Bush told a bunch of lies in his 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis, the Massachusetts Democratic governor. But that movement had petered out. Then Kathleen hired Brooks and said let’s start something here at Penn, which did not have a rating system for the accuracy of the statements from politicians it vetted. I came along in 2007 and started PolitiFact. I created the Truth-O-Meter. This was a different way of presenting fact-checking with ratings from “true” to “false” to “pants on fire,” and that sparked a lot more fact-checking. But it was a gradual evolution. And still it took a while to get to calling a lie a “lie.”

DC: Sticking with the early days, why was there this aversion to either fact-checking or calling out a lie? Where does that aversion come from within our grand journalistic tradition?

BA: Political reporters did not want to call out lies because they were afraid that they would make politicians mad.

DC: That’s it?

BA: Yes, and in fact, I have a scene in my book at the St. Petersburg Times. We’re going around the table, and we’re having this exercise where all the different players are asked, “Should we start PolitiFact?” And we get to the political editor, Adam Smith. He says: “It’s a great idea. I think we should do it, and I want nothing to do with it.” As a political editor—and he was a great investigative reporter—he was afraid of calling out falsehoods.

DC: Do you think political reporters didn’t want to do that only because they feared making politicians mad? Was this also related to this notion of objectivity? Was their view of reporting that they report what people say and don’t get into evaluating these statements because that gets dicey and may make enemies?

BA: Absolutely. That’s what makes what we do in political fact-checking so gutsy. It goes that extra step. I call it reported conclusion journalism. It uses those traditions of objective reporting. Let’s talk to all parties, all sides, find out everything we can, and then reach a conclusion. That final piece, that reported conclusion, makes some people in journalism uncomfortable. Now less so these days. Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party changed a lot of things.

DC: This idea of reported conclusions is interesting. It gets to the essential question: What is journalism? What is the role of the media? I’ve always thought it’s to present truth to readers. Now, sometimes there is no conclusion to reach, no firm truth. Someone claims a tax plan will do this. Someone claims that tax plan will do that. In that instance, you give both sides a say. But in our very complicated world, people don’t often have the time themselves to look at all the details and figure out if something is true or not. Journalism ought to be more than stenographic reporting. It should present the truth when that is possible to do.

BA: There are lots of different forms of journalism. More than ever, we need to recognize that and need to label those forms. There’s opinion journalism. There’s news reporting. There’s fact-checking. Then there’s this sort of amorphous thing that the New York Times and others call analysis. I think it needs to be labeled much better than it is. Where I think things get fuzzy is when people criticize “journalism” or the “media.” I think it’s better if they criticize something more precisely and say they’re referring to news reporting or opinion journalism.

DC: Back to the chronology, when did mainstream journalism reach the point where reporters could use the word “lying?”

BA: So you and others early on said we should use the word “lie.” I was a holdout, even as the founder of PolitiFact. We called things “falsehoods.” Our lowest rating, which we use for the most extreme falsehoods, was “pants on fire.”

DC:  Which is very close to saying “lying.”

BA: Pretty close. But only once a year does PolitiFact use the word “lie,” for its Lie of the Year. But it really took the New York Times, as it often does, and Dean Baquet, its editor at the time, to turn the tide. And I write about this in Beyond the Big Lie—that there was this moment in 2016 when they began to use the word “lie.”

DC: That was when Trump held a press conference to somewhat disavow the birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya that he had pushed, and in reporting on this, the Times noted that Trump had championed a “lie.” [One of newspaper’s articles was headlined, “Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years, and Still Isn’t Apologetic.”]

BA: For me, that was symbolically important, and it gave me pause. I had left PolitiFact at that point. Since then, I’ve come to realize a couple of things. One, if you look at polls, people are not as uptight about the use of the word “lie” as political journalists are. People use the word more loosely than journalists do. They’re not into the definition that it must be a deliberate falsehood. And I’ve come to believe that most of the time, the politician knows it’s a lie. “You mean I’m wrong that immigrants are eating dogs and cats?” They know. So I have really loosened up. My book is called Beyond the Big Lie. You were right back in 2003.

DC: Lies corrode our political discourse. My point at that time was that politicians—particularly elected officials, members of Congress, the president—had an obligation to think about what they were saying and to ensure it was true. What I found with George W. Bush was that he would say something false about climate change, Social Security, the Iraq War, and people would counter that this statement was wrong. Still, he would keep repeating it. He had a responsibility to stop saying it. But he wouldn’t. There was a lot of deliberate presentation of false information again and again. At the time, reporters and others said that he had to know it was a lie—it has to be intentional—for it to be a lie, and we can’t say what’s in his head. Like George Costanza in Seinfeld: “Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.” Journalists were applying that standard to the president, and that’s where I thought things broke down.

BA: I was hoping we’d get a Seinfeld reference into this interview.

DC: In the book’s subtitle, you declare that Republicans lie more than Democrats, and the book is full of data to prove that. Defend that conclusion and tell me why Republicans do it more.

BA: It became apparent to me when I moved to Washington and started covering Congress in the late 1990s and the early aughts that there was a difference in how the parties approached factual claims. Republicans had these talking points and took liberties with the truth, and Democrats were so careful. That gap got worse over the years. By the time that I started PolitiFact in 2007, there was a big difference. I saw it sharply in covering Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. The difference between what Sarah Palin would say and what the Obama campaign would say was remarkable. This was also the beginning of the birther lie about Obama. This difference between the parties grew with the internet. The internet created this frictionless way for Republicans to spread their lies and for the lies to multiple in many ways.

DC: So why do Republicans lie more?

BA: For this book, I asked a lot of politicians, lots of Republicans and former Republicans, why do Republicans lie more? I heard some consistent answers. One was the culture of the party was cemented by Newt Gingrich when he helped Republicans take over the House in the 1990s. He cemented this culture that anything goes, lying is fine. A lot of people marked that moment as the turning point for the party’s culture of lying. Others traced it back farther back to Roger Ailes, the longtime Republican political consultant who went on to create Fox News in 1996, or to Lee Atwater, an infamous Republican strategist, and the negative ads that he created for Republicans.

My favorite quote that sums up the party’s culture came from Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman in Virginia who served one term. He said that Republicans see their cause as this epic struggle, and that is so important that it justifies anything—and it justifies lying.

DC: I wrote about this in American Psychosis. The rise of Gingrich is a key point. At the same time, you had the rise of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh outside the political world, with his combative scorched-earth approach and an iffy approach to the truth, which all meshed well with what Gingrich was doing. The larger political culture in which the Republicans were operating was being radicalized by Limbaugh’s falsehoods and those disseminated by other right-wing media at the time. This was right before Fox News launches.

BA: I’m glad you mentioned that, because I should note the big role talk radio and Fox News play in providing this echo chamber for the lies. The lies get repeated. As we saw with the Dominion case, Fox lost viewers if they did not repeat the lies about the 2020 election. It’s part of the business.

DC: Bill, you’re a pioneer of the fact-checking industry. You’ve talked about how it’s grown over these years. And this is a hard question: Do you think fact-checking works and that it provides a disincentive to politicians to lie? Donald Trump was found to have uttered more than 30,000 falsehoods, misleading statements, and lies by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, and he used his lies about the 2020 election to try to overturn American democracy. Yet here we are. He’s heading back to the White House. Thirty thousand fact-checks did not slow him down. What does that tell us?

BA: It tells us that fact-checking is not working for a large segment of the electorate. I’m going to spend the next years exploring that. Clearly, the facts are not getting to a whole bunch of people that need the facts now.

DC: Why is that?

BA: I think it’s the way that fact-checks are being produced and where they’re published. Crazy Uncle Bob, who is sitting home watching Fox News and listening to talk radio, is not going to the FactCheck.org or PolitiFact websites. We need to figure out ways to get facts to people who are not getting them. Part of it is a distribution problem. We need to get conservative media organizations to do more fact-checking and to realize that fact-checking is a valuable form of journalism. Now the right-wing media has decided to attack it, and you have relatively few conservative media that are producing fact-checks. We need to rethink all of this.

DC: I don’t want to be more pessimistic than is called for at this time about politics and the media, but I wonder if there’s a larger issue of whether enough people care about facts and care about the truth. During the presidential debate, when tens of millions of people are watching, Donald Trump says migrants are eating cat and dogs, and he is immediately called out by the moderator, who says this is not true. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. A lot of social science research has shown us that it’s hard to counter lies. When people hear something, it creates an impression. And if you come along and say, here’s why it’s not true, that second hit might actually reinforce that first impression. Also, people are highly skeptical of information that they don’t want to hear, and they’re highly accepting of information that confirms their own biases and their own views of the world. Moreover, getting facts in front of people is increasingly difficult, given the fragmentation of the media ecosystem. Your Uncle Bob, as you mentioned, doesn’t go to PolitiFact or FactCheck.org. But he’s also not reading the Washington Post or the New York Times, maybe no newspaper at all. In our era of media fragmentation, what happens when people just don’t want to know? 

BA: You’re raising a few different elements. One is the distribution challenge. People are not seeing accurate information, whether it’s fact-checks or other reporting. That needs to be addressed. Another problem is their receptiveness to corrections—whether it’s a fact-check as we currently see them or whatever form we might come up with. How can we create a form that they could be receptive to? I am hopeful we can come up with a more effective form. I don’t think that necessarily shouting “pants on fire” about a false claim is the way to reach them anymore. I realize it’s heresy for the founder of PolitiFact to say that, but with some audiences, a pants on fire Truth-O-Meter is not the most persuasive form.

Then there’s the repetition issue. If you’re watching Fox News, you’re hearing again and again the talking points: Biden’s border crisis, Biden’s border crisis, Biden’s border crisis. That’s hard to push back against. I don’t know what the solution there is. I’m trained as a journalist. I’m not a party activist. As we think about getting accurate information to people who are not getting it, we need to pick apart these elements and figure out how we might address them. That’s what I’m going to try to do. If you go back to interviews with me in 2010, people said fact-checking isn’t working. I said at the time my goal is just to provide people information and then they can make of it what they will. I’m not saying that anymore. What I’m now saying is, let’s find a way to make information more effective so that it reaches everyone.

DC: Final point, then I’ll let you go. While covering one of Trump’s last campaign rallies, which was in Reading, Pennsylvania, the day before the election, I had—and this may be a big word—an epiphany. After talking to many die-hard Trump supporters there—and thinking about how they got information and why they were repeating so many falsehoods that echoed Trump’s rhetoric—I realized that for them Trump is the media. He is their information source. They have forged a bond with him. They accept him as the paramount presenter of the truth. If anyone challenges what he says, whether it’s the Washington Post or Mike Pence, it doesn’t matter. As some liberals look at news outlets like the New York Times or NPR as sources of accurate information, they see Trump that way. He fills that role for millions. How can fact-checking or truth-based reporting counter that?

BA: That’s the situation today. What happens after he’s gone? Is there anyone who can completely fill that role? Obviously, there are potential successors. But is there anyone that has all those skills? I’m not sure about that. But you’re right; he’s the ultimate influencer. He is also this throwback: a politician who craves being on the cover of Time magazine. And yet, in ways that confound us, he has mastered podcasts and these emerging forms of media, while other politicians are still trying. Ultimately, he’s still a politician, and we need to find ways to hold him and other politicians accountable. But we need to adapt, and we can learn lessons from watching him and from examining how things have changed. That’s what my book’s about, and that’s what we must do in the future.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

We’re saying farewell to 2024 with another Our Land Zoom shindig on Wednesday, December 18, at 8 p.m. ET. You know the drill. These sessions are open only to premium subscribers. On the day of the gathering, these readers will be emailed a Zoom link. Click on it at the appointed hour, and Our Land bouncers will let you in. As we head into 2025, we all may need a dash of camaraderie, and I hope to hold these events more regularly. If you’re not a premium subscriber and would like to join this community and participate, please sign up here. Once more: Many thanks to our premium crowd for parting with a few dollars each month to support this newsletter. In return, they receive extra features in each issue, the opportunity to join me and their fellow Our Landers for these enlightening and (sometimes) encouraging conversations, and, I hope, the satisfaction of knowing that because of them, we at Our Land can keep on keeping on.

Jeff Bezos can’t seem to stay out of this feature. The billionaire was named in our last installment for declaring he was “optimistic” about Trump’s incoming presidency. Now he’s back for pledging to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and for making a $1 million in-kind donation by agreeing to stream the event on Amazon Video. Joining Bezos in this suck-up generosity is Meta-man Mark Zuckerberg, who’s also throwing a million smackers at Trump’s inauguration. Remember, tech moguls and top corporations have no obligation to support a presidential inauguration. Most firms and tycoons do not. This is a choice they’re making to get on Trump’s good side and to further normalize him.

What a long, strange trip it’s been since Zuckerberg booted Trump off Facebook for trying to destroy American democracy. Remember this?

By the way, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is joining these tech bros and kicking in $1 million as well. Lest we forget, as I reported a few years ago, Trump and his family members were investigated for misusing funds for the first Trump inauguration to enrich—wait for it—the Trump family.  The Trump Organization settled the case by paying $750,000 but without admitting any wrongdoing. These billionaires are sending big bucks to a grifter with an authoritarian agenda. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what they stand to make by winning the favor of this wannabe autocrat.

If you have a nomination for Accomplice Watch, email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.