Q&A with Bill Adair on "Beyond The Big Lie"
Q&A with Bill Adair on "Beyond The Big Lie"
Bill would like to apologize to C-SPAN caller Brian from Michigan, thinks Meta avoids fact-checking politicians out of self-interest, and is still disappointed in his former neighbor Mike Pence.
Hello and welcome to this special edition of Faked Up.
This is a Q&A with my friend and mentor Bill Adair about his new book “Beyond the Big Lie” which is out today.
Bill is a professor of practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke and the founder of Pulitzer-prize winning fact-checking website PolitiFact. Bill inspired me and many others around the world to get into fact-checking. His book is a critical study of liars, lies, and their consequences.
I was originally hoping to release this as a podcast. And we did in fact record this interview — at a Pret A Manger in New York City, like all the podcast pros — but my mic failed me. What follows, then, is a lightly edited transcript of our Q&A.
I want to start with Brian from Michigan. Could you tell me a little bit about why your exchange with him opens your book and whether you think the obsession with appearing – and not just being – impartial has hindered fact-checkers’ mission?
So the book opens with a scene of me taking calls on C-SPAN when Brian from Michigan calls in on the Democratic line and says, “I hear that Republicans lie more. Is this true, Mr. Adair?”
And I lied.
I said, “At PolitiFact, we don't keep score” and basically dodged his question. I was lying because we did keep score. We kept tallies by politician and I knew that Brian was right; I knew that Republicans lied more.
This was 2012. I think probably any fact-checker at that time and now would say that Republicans lied more then and lie more today. But they dodged the question because they wanted, as you noted, to appear impartial.
But someone needs to keep that tally and reveal this truth that Republicans do lie more because it's crippling our discourse. It's making it impossible for us to have an honest conversation about important issues like immigration and climate. The fact that Republicans lie more makes it really difficult to have a political debate.
I don't think that it's hindered the fact-checkers’ mission to remain impartial. But when you have this asymmetry and one side that lies a lot more, it makes it hard for fact-checkers to make honest calls that reflect that asymmetry and then deal with the blowback.
There’s a new paper on Nature that speaks a little to this asymmetry. The researchers claim that pro-Trump social media users tended to share far more links to low-quality news “even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople.”
I’m wondering if you see a commonality between fact-checkers and platforms when it comes to appearing impartial faced with a potentially unequal barrage of misinformation?
There's a lot of similarities and it's as difficult for the platforms as it is for the fact-checkers because they get called biased and called censors for just doing their jobs in trying to reduce misinformation.
There’s a great line in that study: “if dog-lovers share more misinformation than cat-lovers, we would expect more dog-lovers than cat-lovers to get suspended by social media companies—and would not interpret such a pattern as reflecting bias against dog-lovers.”
And I think we're in a very difficult situation because of this asymmetry. It creates a lot of problems.
Journalists have wanted to pretend that there is this equal-ness because our traditions before fact-checking, our traditions in covering politics, have been based on this norm that things would be equal. We get equal commentary from both sides. There's this sense of fairness and balance. Embedded in that was an assumption that when there are misdeeds they would be roughly equally distributed.
Instead, we've got this way out-of-whack situation with lying. And it puts fact-checkers in a really difficult situation.
This timidity towards calling a spade a spade is reflected in the posture of many tech platforms today. In a letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Congressman Jim Jordan about a month ago, he literally speaks about the appearance of neutrality mattering as much as the neutrality itself.
Facebook, which you put in your "Lying Hall of Fame," invested a lot in its Third Party Fact-Checking Program1 but also decided to prevent fact-checkers from flagging political figures as part of this program. Why are political lies fair game for Facebook?
Well, I think it reflects two things. One, I do think there is a genuine belief on the part of the people who run Meta that they really want to show a hands-off approach to political speech.
But even more so, they want to show a hands-off approach to the people who might regulate them.
And so they don't want to upset Republican politicians given the asymmetry we were talking about earlier and the extent to which they have been talking about “censorship” by social media companies.
Now, whether a Republican-controlled Congress and White House would take action against them, we would have to see. But I think Meta has avoided allowing fact-checking of politicians out of its own interest.
You dedicate a chapter to Eric Barber, who got 45 days in jail for breaching the US Capitol on January 6. The way you describe his career, it certainly reads like the evolution of a person who could have gone down a few different paths.
I find it interesting how there’s almost an "audience capture" issue where Barber starts off as a bit of a political hybrid but keeps posting more of what got him social media plaudits — pro-Trump stuff – and then essentially gets high off his own supply. What's your take: was there an off-ramp for him? Is there a parallel universe where he didn't storm the Capitol?
It's a great question. And I think the answer is, a different algorithm and you could have had a different outcome.
I think he was radicalized by Facebook. I'm not saying that, he said that. He told the investigators from the January 6th committee that.
And when you look in detail at his actions the way I did, and you study the way that he first switched parties, he had been a Democrat, he became a Republican when he was on the Parkersburg West Virginia City Council, and suddenly two things happened.
His feed filled up with clips from Fox News, He filled his own posts with extreme Trumpy comments. And as he explains, he got lots of love for that.
And at a moment in his life when he needed love, he was getting it thanks to the Facebook algorithm.
And I think if that algorithm had been different, it would have been a whole different outcome for Eric and a whole bunch of other people.
Sticking to this topic a little, I love how you write with empathy but detachment about people who deployed deception (you’ve done this before with Stephen Glass in a moving profile on AirMail).
I'd like to discuss how you think empathy might be deployed when dealing with folks attracted by serious lies before they end up defining their lives.
Well, I think it's really valuable to get outside our bubble and talk to people we wouldn't otherwise talk to.
It was really enlightening for me to talk to Eric, even if he initially balked at that — he wanted to charge me money for our interviews and for pictures.
But eventually we had extended conversations on Facebook Messenger, and I really came to understand him.
It's very easy, you know, if you're a college professor like I am, to sort of live in a bubble. And it's valuable to get outside that bubble and talk to lots of different kinds of people and do it at length.
I think fact-checkers should do that. I think fact-checking shouldn't just be checking claims. I think it should involve all sorts of journalism, including talking to the people who spread falsehoods and believe falsehoods.
You dedicate a chapter to Mike Pence, who was enough of a neighborly acquaintance that you hosted his farewell party when he left DC after getting elected Governor of Indiana. The way I read the chapter, you seem less willing to empathize with his attitude to political lying than with Barber's.
Yes, definitely.
What happened with Mike was he had many opportunities to stand up to Donald Trump and show he cared about all the lies and show some backbone.
As vice president he really had independence from Trump and could have, you know, been a one term vice president and said I'm not going to allow this. Instead he sacrificed that opportunity for his own ambition.
Even when he did the right thing in certifying Biden's election, he wouldn't stand up against Trump's lies. He never did in any forceful way. And within a couple of months he authored a op-ed that paid lip service to the election lies for the Heritage Foundation.
He then had the chutzpah to market, when he was running for president, some T-shirts and hats that used the Trump quote, “you're too honest, Mike.” He was trying to portray himself as the ‘too honest’ candidate, and I thought that was ridiculous because he had not stood up to Trump.
So, yes, I was very disappointed in him. He was the most prominent person who could have stood up to Trump, and he didn't.
Your book also covers the story of Nina Jankowicz, who was appointed to a relatively humdrum coordination role at DHS but recast as a “Ministry of Truth” by hyperpartisan media and politicians able to exploit a lousy rollout.
I think every intervention by government in this space should be looked at carefully, but what happened to Nina was different, right? There were vicious personal attacks and threats directed to her that weren’t political disagreement; they were pure hate.
The book contains stories of people who are affected by lies or who chose to lie, and I think that's one of the things I found most interesting when writing it. It's not an academic book — it's a story about how and why politicians lie and what the effects are.
So, in Nina's case, it began because she was heading an organization called the Disinformation Governance Board that was given one of the worst names ever by a government agency and one of the worst communications strategies by the Department of Homeland Security, which then stood by clueless when the agency and Nina began to get attacked ruthlessly by the Republicans with this endless series of lies.
So I tell that story because I think it's revealing about how Washington works and doesn't work. It was the Democrats that fumbled that and their utter cluelessness is really interesting to watch.
Another aspect of this that is important, because it's kind of a sub-theme in the book, is the misogyny. There is clearly a pattern in that victims of many of the lies, or the subjects of many of the lies, are women, such as Nina, Kate Starbird, Renee DiResta.
Can we step back from this with a recourse to facts? I used to think that we could find common ground through a fact-based public discourse but I don't know any more. Tim Miller, whom you interviewed for the book, and knows this universe well, says things will get worse.
It seems like you’re more optimistic, why?
Optimism. How can I have any in this?
There was a moment in 2007 when I started PolitiFact when I had great optimism.
And I've talked to people in tech, like people at Google, who also had great optimism, who thought, “We're at the dawn of something really cool.” Well, it turned out we were at the dawn of something that was going to be an utter mess.
So the internet has been used by bad people to do bad things in many ways more effectively than good people trying to do good things.
But I do believe there are ups and downs.
The terrible misinformation problem today [ed. note: Oct. 6] is in western North Carolina, where there are all sorts of false rumors about the government response to Helene, a storm that ravaged that area. People are confused, they're not getting the resources they need, but there's also just so many falsehoods. I think, ultimately, all people will sort of reflect back on that and say, oh my God, that was awful.
And so I just believe ultimately that people will wake up about this and say, we've got to fix this.
I have in the book a variety of ideas, some of them pretty provocative in how we can combat lying in politics. And so, yes, I'm hopeful.
Let's jump into one of the these ideas. I think the solutions parts of books are often the weakest; I found yours to be among the more practical and interesting I've read in books about deception. You suggest that we need a social and cultural shift around lying in politics akin to what we have seen in the United States over gay marriage.
Who can be an advocate or a spokesperson for the truth, given that fact-checkers themselves are under attack and, unfortunately, disproportionately, there's a discrepancy in trust levels for reasons we’ve discussed.
I'm not sure who that person is. But imagine if that person were to start a well-funded movement and get politicians to just make a simple commitment: “I won't lie in campaigns or in office.”
There's a similar effort on the Republican side by Grover Norquist, who runs Americans for Tax Reform. He gets a lot of Republicans, including most of the Republicans in the House and Senate, to sign this pledge. It's so effective, they just call it “The Pledge.”
Imagine if this person, and I don't know who it could be, some Oprah-like figure. I mean, it's got to be someone who can get some bipartisan support. And now Oprah has spoken at the Democratic Convention, so I'm not sure.
But anyway, someone who can just say, “Hey, both parties should do this.”
Imagine if the Republican Party made it a part of their core beliefs not to lie anymore. There's no reason that lying has to be part of their arsenal. It's not like that's part of conservative doctrine. They could become the party of truth and they could wield that against the Democrats. I actually don't think that they gain that much from lying.
Another proposal in the book would tie ad rates for political candidates to their truthfulness. I’ve heard versions of this proposal be pitched and find it sadly improbable, but I think it’s worth discussing because it introduces incentives to be factual rather than remove speech. Can you tell me a little bit more?
Sure — and I should note that this idea came from one of the students who took my “Lying in Politics” class.
So I think of lying as a big economy. Politicians lie because they think it pays off. They lie to score points against their opponent or with their base; it gets them on some cable news network.
Whatever it is, there is this calculation that they go through, so we need to change that calculation so that there is a disincentive to lie and an incentive to tell the truth.
So what are the things politicians need? Well, they need advertising, especially online advertising that is now much more effective now than broadcast media.
So imagine if Facebook and Google that sell politicians ads charge higher rates for the ones that had worse records with the fact-checkers and lower rates for the ones that had good records. That's not crazy. I think that could work!
One last thing, because I still believe in the power of the internet to do a little bit of good. If Brian, the C-SPAN caller from Michigan, reads this Q&A — will you send him a free copy of the book?
Absolutely!
And I will thank Brian for asking me such an important question and getting me to reflect on this.
You know, I feel bad that I lied to Brian, but because I was able to look back on that, it really helped me sort out what we should do in some important ways.
Alright Brian, you heard it here first. Free book, on Bill. For everyone else, it’s $29.99 wherever you buy your books.
Not sure this is a disclosure that needs making here but just in case: I played a non trivial role in setting this up when I was director of the International Fact-Checking Network.