Big Lies Need Even Bigger Fact Checking

An enduring bit of wisdom in selling works of popular nonfiction is that if a book spends most of its length identifying and elucidating a problem, it must have a prescriptive element in its final pages. Give the readers a happy ending; make them feel empowered to make change. All gloom and doom is bad for sales.

Which is why I was excited to flip to the end of Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy by Bill Adair, the creator of PolitiFact. The book itself may be preaching to the choir about the enormous need to quell the enormous amounts of misinformation and disinformation spread by our political leaders (especially the Republican ones), laying out how lies have grown bolder and more pernicious (most famously, about results over the 2020 election) over time with the advent of social media and podcasts and cable news. There are so many more ways to spread lies than there used to be, what a world!

But I expected to see at least one very concrete suggestion in this book about the importance of fact checking: book publishers should standardize fact checking. Alas.

Instead, Adair’s recommendations to reduce political lying—sorry to skip right to the end here—turn out to be not so easy to implement. In fact, they feel downright naive. Change how politicians behave, Adair proposes, by rewarding them for truth-telling. Citizens can demand anti-lying oaths from their leaders, or depend on social media platforms to lower ad rates or issue “truthfulness badges” to non-liars (are we really going to ask Mark Zuckerberg and active Trump fan boy Elon Musk to be the arbiters of truth?) But not a word about book publishers.

Part of the absence of book publishers is, I imagine, a definitional problem: fact checking means different things to different people. Adair distinguishes between the process magazine editors use to check work before publication with the kind of fact checking he’s advocating for, the kind that reduces the amplification of political lies: “Magazine fact-checking is part of the editorial process to ensure accuracy; political fact-checking is a genre of journalism that holds politicians accountable for what they say and produce.”

So which kind of fact checking should publishers be doing? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say a little bit of both. Book publishers have long avoided requiring more journalistic fact checks beyond copy edits and legal reads. Some of us have been out here begging for more standardized journalistic fact checking for a while now.

But there’s plenty of room for that second kind of political fact-checking in books, too. Adair illustrates this point by noting that his own publisher (Simon & Schuster) also put out So Help Me God by Mike Pence, Adair’s former neighborhood friend whose penchant to misrepresent the truth seemed to accelerate with his political ambitions. Pence’s memoir, according to Adair, is a testament to Pence’s long history as a Trump enabler: “Missing from Mike’s account of that day [January 6], and from the 542-page book overall, is any hint that he was outraged by Trump’s thousands of lies over the four years they served together.”

Note that the expression of despicable opinions is not what Adair is criticizing here—this isn’t about Pence being a raging homophobe. It’s about publishers who platform wannabe politicians and media personalities who are known to play fast and loose with facts are culpable in spreading misinformation (lies told inadvertently) or even disinformation (lies told knowingly and on purpose).

Beyond the Big Lie opens with a lie that Adair himself used to tell regularly. When asked if one political party tended to lie more than another, Adair would say no in the interest of presenting himself as nonpartisan. But he had the data from PolitiFact all along: “The pattern, then and now, is that Republicans simply lied more. A lot more.”

I understand that book publishers want to offer a marketplace of ideas. I understand that the right has a large audience, or at least they have Super PACs that order such books in bulk (see the success of S&S-distributed number one bestseller Melania). But for Simon & Schuster to put out a book about the scourge of political lying while platforming political liars feels blatantly and cynically hypocritical.

Adair’s quotation of media critic Jeff Jarvis gets at the heart of the matter: “Republicans and authoritarians know how to exploit the weak underbelly of enlightened democracy… They recognized, more than anything else, the weakness in mainstream mass media—which is to say that our obsession over the years with ‘balance’ was easy to exploit.” It’s not too late to begin to correct those mistakes. We can start with the lowest hanging fruit: demand that all nonfiction books be fact-checked.