Bill Adair, Duke University journalism professor and founder of the “fact-checking” site PolitiFact, indulged his warped scales with a sympathetic host on tax-funded PBS, sending out a fair-and-balanced message: Republicans love to lie!
Guest host Bianna Golodryga encapsulated Adair’s ideological view in her introduction.
Bianna Golodryga: As Americans gear up for the election, our next guest warns of an epidemic of lying in U.S. politics, particularly within the Republican Party. Bill Adair joins Michel Martin to discuss his new book, "Beyond the Big Lie." As founder of fact-checking website PolitiFact, he is well placed to account for where disinformation comes from, how it spreads, and the danger that it poses to democracy.
The full title of Adair’s book laid out his prejudice: Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy. Does that sound like the stance of an objective truth-seeker trying to win you over by argument? Or more of a partisan Democratic hack?
Journalist Michel Martin prodded Adair to tell his heroic origin story, his founding of PolitiFact in 2007 while Washington bureau chief for what’s now the Tampa Bay Times.
Martin: The other thing you say in the book, and this is something that obviously we're seeing play out right now in the current election season, you say Republicans do it more. Why is that?
Adair: So, that has been apparent to me really since before I started PolitiFact. When I was covering Congress, I remember thinking, you know, there's just a lot more, at the time, stretching the truth and lying coming from Republicans. I covered the Capitol, and whatever the issue was, I would just find that Republicans took more liberties. And then, when I became editor of PolitiFact, and we started PolitiFact in 2007, we really saw it firsthand. And if you think about the 2008 presidential campaign, that was Sarah Palin, it was Joe the Plumber, then came Obamacare and all the lies about Obamacare….I don't think there's any question that pattern was true and is particularly true now [with Trump].
(Oddly, Adair skipped a rare moment of PolitiFact balance, when his organization crowned Barack Obama with the 2013 “Lie of the Year” for his false claim that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” under his administration’s convoluted universal health insurance scheme known as Obamacare.)
Adair said the Republicans he talked to (both current and former) “put the turning point in the early 1990s when Newt Gingrich took over the House Republicans.” In other words, when Republicans started fighting aggressively and took over the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. And of course, Fox News and talk radio, “that not only doesn't question the lies from Republicans, but echoes them and even profits from them.”
PolitiFact has had a long culture of unacknowledged Democratic partisanship since its inception, as NewsBusters has long documented. Just one recent example of tilt, as noted by NewsBusters Tim Graham: "On September 4, Trump was rated as 'Pants on Fire' for calling Kamala Harris a 'communist.' But Democrats and leftists (even TV hosts) have called Trump a 'fascist.' Search PolitiFact for a harsh rating on that, and you won’t find any fact check."
Asked by Martin why don’t Democrats lie more if it’s so effective, Adair responded in a way that would surely puff up a self-righteous liberal fit to burst.
Adair: The Democrats are stopped from lying by two things. One, I don't think they believe it's as effective as the Republicans do. They also don't have the media ecosystem that would egg them on the way that the conservative ecosystem does. And they also feel shame in ways that I'm afraid too many politicians on the right do not….
Adair has even thought up capricious, whimsical ways to punish Republican politicians for disagreeing with people who think like Adair: “…how about charging more to politicians who have worse records for lying and charging lower rates for politicians that have better records….”
