Vermont Conversation: PolitiFact founder Bill Adair on how lies threaten democracy – VTDigger

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America is drowning beneath a tsunami of lies.

The 2024 presidential campaign may be distinguished by the sheer volume and audacity of lying.  Donald Trump has made embracing The Big Lie — the false claim that he won the 2020 election — a condition of entry into the MAGA universe. Once you accept The Big Lie, similarly brazen but smaller lies flow easily. And so Trump falsely claims that immigrants are eating pets and that disaster relief money is being stolen by Democrats and given to immigrants.

Lying is a bipartisan phenomenon, but Republicans dwarf Democrats in the number of lies that they tell. In September, New York Times fact-checkers analyzed a single stump speech made by both presidential candidates. Former President Trump made 64 false or inaccurate statements in his speech, while Vice President Kamala Harris made six such statements. In October, CNN determined that Trump made 40 false claims in just two speeches.

During the course of his presidency, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of 21 per day, according to the Washington Post. 

“This is the flood-the-zone concept that … Steve Bannon articulated early in the Trump presidency,” said Bill Adair, who founded the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization PolitiFact in 2007 when he was Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). “The other practitioner of this is Vladimir Putin.”

Adair is now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. He has a new book, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”

“I think the consequences (for lying) are minimal, if any, now for Republican politicians, because the echo chamber repeats the lies so easily and Republican politicians are not held accountable,” Adair said.

Fox News has shown that political lying can be profitable. “Conservative media not only has looked the other way when Republican politicians lie, but conservative media has echoed the lies brought in by commentators that have repeated the lies, and conservative media, interestingly, has found there’s money in those lies,” Adair said. “Fox found if it did not repeat the lies about the 2020 election, that it lost viewers.” 

There is also a price for lying: In 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $788 million for peddling phony conspiracy theories claiming that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden. 

Adair argued that the disparity in political lying between Republicans and Democrats “has serious consequences. It not only makes it impossible for us to have a serious conversation about climate, to have a serious conversation about immigration, but it threatens our democracy. Because we can very easily envision not just a rerun of 2020 come the results of the November election. We can see that this time it could turn into a real crisis for our country all because of lies.”