Beyond the Big Lie
The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Bill Adair, Pulitzer Prize winner, journalism professor, and founder of Politifact, presents an eye-opening and engaging history of political liars and a vision for how to make them stop.
Bill Adair knows a lie when he hears one. Since 2008, the site he founded, PolitiFact, has been the go-to spot for media members and political observers alike to seek the truth in an increasingly deceitful world. Since the site’s launching, politics’ tenuous relationship with the truth has only gotten weaker—and weirder.
In this groundbreaking book, Adair reveals how politicians lie and why. Relying on dozens of candid interviews with politicians, political operatives, and experts in misinformation, Adair reveals the patterns of lying, why Republicans do it more, and the consequences for our democracy. He goes behind the scenes to describe several episodes that reveal the motivations and tactics of the nation’s political liars, show the impact they have on people’s lives, and demonstrate how the problem began before Donald Trump and will continue after he’s gone. Adair examines how Republicans have tried to change the landscape to allow their lying by intimidating the news media, people in academia and government, and tech companies.
An award-winning journalist and pioneer in political fact-checking, Adair is uniquely able to tell this story. With humor and insight, this remarkable book unpacks the sad state of our politics, but also, provides solutions to put an end to American political deceit once and for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Republicans lie more and they lie worse," according to this unbalanced debut from Adair, creator of the fact-checking site PolitiFact. While Adair notes Democrats also lie, he focuses mainly on Republican misrepresentations, which he says PolitiFact knows are more frequent and serious based on an internal tally kept by the organization. These include lies about immigration and crime, as well as "the Big Lie" of Donald Trump's 2020 election denialism. Adair floats anodyne theories about why politicians lie (to gain political advantage) and why lies work (because partisan media validates them), and lambasts the Trump-era lying of Mike Pence, a former friend. Adair's discussion is weakened by a frustrating lack of perceptiveness around Democrat mistruths; he devotes three entire chapters to the 2022 furor over the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board and its head, Nina Jankowicz, tagging Republicans with firing a "heavy artillery of lies" when they forced Jankowicz to resign by accusing her of spreading misinformation about Hunter Biden's laptop. This feels like an overly partisan centerpiece case, given that the laptop is an incredibly murky story in which no one involved seems not to have shaded the truth, including Jankowicz, who, while clearly scapegoated, did make statements validating the widely propagated (and as yet unproven) Democrat talking point that the laptop was Russian disinformation. It makes for an oddly myopic view of what constitutes lying.
