Pulitzer Prize Winner’s Revealing Lie

In 2012, Bill Adair, founder of Politifact, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalism fact-checking website, lied on a C-SPAN call-in show.

During an appearance on Washington Journal, Adair took a question from someone identified as “Brian from Michigan”, who wanted to know if Republicans lied more than Democrats. With years of data supporting the conclusion that Republicans not only lied more, but a lot more, Adair nonetheless told the caller that Politifact didn’t keep score.

Early this month, in the Columbia Journalism Review, Adair confessed, “Thirteen years ago, I lied to a guy named Brian on national television …. I lied to Brian because I was determined to show I was an impartial journalist and did not want to be accused of bias.”

Adair’s lie is a stark and revealing glimpse of a time when the journalism profession had been intimidated by two decades of an intentionally divisive onslaught of Republican accusations of bias and partisanship. Ever since Newt Gingrich, as head of GOPAC, a central source of messaging for the Republican Party, launched his campaign in the late 1980s to control the political narrative of the country, journalists had succumbed to normalizing language and behavior that was far outside the norms of the civil discourse needed for a functioning government.

Significantly, Paul Farhi, writing for the Washington Post in 2004, noted that the news media’s adoption of the red-blue divide – a product of Gingrich’s efforts – was more caricature than an accurate portrayal of the political landscape. Dutifully, journalists who looked at the world through this lens of a divided nation did not question when Republicans who publicly disagreed with the party line were called RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.  With that mindset, journalists also understood that when Republicans accused them of partisanship, the allegation carried enough weight to damage their careers.

For Adair, this meant that rather than respond with the evidence-based knowledge he possessed, his instinct was to suppress the truth in favor of a kind of reverse bias that promoted, or at least didn’t contradict, the notion of a false equivalency between the two political parties and his own false neutrality.

In fact, by not telling Brian the score, Adair missed an opportunity to call to account the falsehoods of the anti-government, anti-democracy narrative being spun by the GOP – a narrative that helped pave the way for Donald Trump and Project 2025.