Overview

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.

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9781668050705

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Reviews

“Bill Adair was there at the beginning of the fact-checking movement. His decades in journalism make this an indispensable read for anyone who wants to understand why lying matters. Bill is one of my heroes. This blurb is ‘Mostly True.’” —Al Franken, Former U.S. Senator from Minnesota and New York Times bestselling author “In this new and valuable book, the man who all but single-handedly revived the fact-checking movement, Bill Adair, offers reflections only he could, providing fresh accounts of how and why politicians lie, revealing the efforts to discredit journalists and researchers, and offering ideas to improve fact-checking to reduce lying. And he makes it readable as hell.” —Tom Rosenstiel, co-author of The Elements of Journalism “Beyond the Big Lie has it all. Bill Adair's book is timely, engaging and important, especially in America's fraught political environment. Democracy depends on truth, but truth-telling is in ever shorter supply, especially on the right. Bill Adair, with his long and storied record as an analyst of political lies, unearths the causes and looks ahead to the dire results of this freedom-killing epidemic.” —Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and former public editor of The New York Times “Bill Adair is among the few contemporary journalists whose work has changed our business. With humility and boldness, Beyond the Big Lie describes how behavior as ancient as human beings has grown so dangerous in 21st-century politics. And it holds out hope that good-faith media might yet temper the dishonesty that's especially pervasive within the modern Republican Party.” —John Harwood, former CNN White House Correspondent

Author Information

Bill Adair is an award-winning journalist and educator. He is the creator of PolitiFact and cofounder of the International Fact-Checking Network. In 2013, he became the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (with the PolitiFact staff), the Manship Prize for New Media in Democratic Discourse, and the Everett Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress.

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