Your support helps us to tell the story
The creator of a top political fact-checking website has finally revealed which party lies more: Democrats or Republicans.
Bill Adair, who started the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact, admitted that – despite his claims over the years – he was, in fact, keeping tabs and found the GOP to be the most liberal with the truth.
In 2012, Adair was asked which party lies more by a caller on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and claimed he “didn’t keep score.”
The former Washington Bureau Chief for the Tampa Bay Times has since left the nonprofit fact-checking company and so said he can now “talk freely” about who is more deceitful.
Appearing on Washington Journal 12 years later, as part of a media blitz to promote his new book Beyond the Big Lie, the fact checker admitted he “was lying” in 2012 to show his company was “truly nonpartisan.”
By PolitiFact’s tally, the Republican party was actually lying “far more” than the Democrats – and since then, Adair, has found the disparity between the parties has only grown.
Between 2016 to 2021, Republicans lied 55 percent of the time, compared to Democrats 31 percent of the time, according to Adair’s company’s investigations of politicians’ statements.
“I think we need to talk about it because the fact that there are so many lies coming from the Republicans, it’s really affecting our discourse,” he said on Thursday.
The journalist, who is now a professor at Duke University, said that it was clear that the Republican party “took more liberties” from even before he founded PolitiFact in 2007.
“That has been apparent since before I started PolitiFact,” he said on PBS’s Amanpour and Company on Wednesday.
“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 the Republicans.’
“I would just find that Republicans took more liberties.”
When asked what may have caused the rise in disparity between the parties, Adair insisted: “This is not a book about Donald Trump.”
Yet, Trump has twice earned the title of PolitiFact’s liar of the year.
His current standing on the fact-checking website is that 76 percent of his claims are either “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire” – the highest degree of lie which PolitiFacts considers a “ridiculous claim”.
Meanwhile 47 percent of Vice President Kamala Harris’s claims are said to be either mostly false or false, none of which have earned the pants on fire accolade, as per the website.
To ensure it wasn’t Trump single-handedly tipping the scales for Republicans, Adair tried removing the former president from the count to see if it would still be the worst offending party.
“To be doubly sure, we removed the biggest liar, Donald Trump, and there were still far more lies from the Republicans than the Democrats,” he told PBS.
“So I don’t think there’s any question… that pattern is true and is particularly true now.”
While the data shows GOP politicians lie more, the question remains, why?
To Adair, lying is systemic within the Republican party.
“Republicans see their work as part of this epic battle and in that, it is such an important cause to them that they really believe that lying is justified in that epic battle,” he added.
