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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show WNYC. Good morning everyone. Here, with nine days to go in 2021, let's talk about the biggest Pinocchios of the year. What's the Pinocchio? Well, as the year winds down, you may be seeing a whole bunch of those year-end lists and roundups. Best music, best books, best movies, worst trends, all that. In this age of this information, there was also some value in reflecting on some of the biggest, most pervasive lies we heard over the last year too. January 6th and stolen election lies, obviously, pandemic science lies, obviously, but also other things.

With us now is Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer of the Fact Checker for The Washington Post. His year-end round-up is a list of the biggest Pinocchios of the year. They grade the statements of public officials on a scale of Pinocchios from one to five. Hi, Glenn. Thanks for doing this with us. Early Happy New Year. Welcome to WNYC today.

Glenn Kessler: Happy to be with you. I should fact-check you, we grade from one to four.

Brian: Oh, one to four. Okay. For some reason, that four looks so big to my eye, expands to five. The Washington Post grades statements of public officials on a scale of Pinocchios from one to four. There it is, correction. Remind everyone in general, first about how you award Pinocchios throughout the year.

Glenn: Well, we have a column, we aim for at least five times a week. We focus particularly on statements made by politicians or political figures or advocacy groups, and then we judge the accuracy of those statements on a scale, as I said, from one to four. There's also another thing called the Geppetto Checkmark, that's when it's absolutely completely true, that we tend to reserve that for statements that are unexpectedly true. Something did you hear that, you think, "Oh, that has to be false," but it turns out to be true.

We don't fact-check things that you would assume are true. One Pinocchio means, it's a little off, you might look at that as almost mostly true. Two Pinocchios is like half true. Three Pinocchios, it's getting to be mostly false. There's serious factual problems with that. Then four Pinocchios is whoppers. Then when we do the biggest Pinocchios of the year, we select the most important biggest claims that had merited four Pinocchios during the course of the year.

Brian: That's the list. We're going to go down right now. Listeners, do you read The Washington Post Fact Checker column? If so, you can call up and ask Glenn Kessler a question. You can also call up and suggest your own biggest Pinocchio of the year from anybody in the categories that he was just talking about. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet your biggest Pinocchio @BrianLehrer. Just to reinforce, this should be obvious to people, but you're talking about public officials, advocacy groups, things like that in the public eye. Uncle Jim, who says on Facebook that the COVID vaccine makes you magnetic, he doesn't make it into The Washington Post, right?

Glenn: Right. Occasionally, we'll fact-check viral content and one thing, in particular, ended up on our list. Generally, we focus on people in power, people that have ability to make a difference in public life with their words and actions. That was one reason why we tried our best not to fact-check Donald Trump much this past year. Occasionally, we had to venture into it, but he's an out-of-work ex-president. Maybe he'll run again. If he does, then we'll start fact-checking him on a more regular basis.

Brian: I think that was a dilemma, maybe the word is, for a lot of news organizations this year. We certainly dealt with it here on the show, the impulse to ignore Trump because he was out of office. Why give him the spotlight, especially if he's going to lie so much? Versus, he's having real influence in the body politic still, so it's important to fact-check him. How did you walk that line?

Glenn: Well, what we look for were new things he said. One thing about Trump is that he's awfully repetitive. He just keeps adding to his arsenal of lies. In fact, we even published a best-selling book in 2020 called Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth, because we had been cataloging every false and misleading statement he made during his presidency. At the time we wrote the book, it was 16,000, by the time he left office a year later, it was 30,000. It's something I never want to go through again, as I lost my life to keeping up that database.

If he said something that was fresh or new, that was generating interest among readers, and they wondered whether or not that was correct. For instance, he said the US had left $85 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan. Well, that was an issue that people wanted to know because it got a lot of white traction. It wasn't just Trump, but it was other right-leaning figures that said it.

We did a comprehensive look at one point at the variety of statements he was still making about the election because he had narrowed it down to what was happening in particular swing states. While we had fact-checked it very carefully when he was president, there were new things he added to his arsenal of falsehoods related to the audits and things like that. There was something fresh or new, we would do a fact-check on it, but we wouldn't do the routine easily fact-check BS that Trump is known for.

Brian: Let's go down the list. I can't tell actually, from my reading of it, whether you've ranked these Pinocchios as the biggest lie of the year, the second biggest lie of the year, or if you just aggregated them. To my eye, the first one that's in the article, at least the way it displays for me on the site, is a Trump lie having to do with a stolen election, correct?

Glenn: Right. There's not necessarily a list, we put it in an order that we think keeps up people's interests. It's not like one ranks above the others. Obviously, I would say, in this case, number one and two, they're connected. Which is the continuing election lies, and the second one, the January 6 falsehoods. Literally, January 6 was a consequence of the things Trump had been saying about the election. Then the fact that he continues to say it and it continued to have impact. There's technically not an order, but there was a reason why I--

Brian: Let's take one. Let's take one from your January 6 lies category from Trump. You wrote, "Trump falsely claimed that he requested 10,000 troops to protect the Capitol, but that that request was rejected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi." What's the truth?

Glenn: The truth is, this is an excuse that Trump and his supporters have suggested, gives him an out for having nothing to do with January 6. That he supposedly had ordered that there be 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the Capitol and that Nancy Pelosi had rejected it. It was her fault, he wanted to put the troops there. What really happened was Trump had a meeting on Iran with a bunch of officials, including the Defense Secretary.

Offhandedly, he said, "There going to be like a million people coming to my match on January 6, you're probably going to need 10,000 troops there." The Pentagon officials, we now know, were actually really worried that Trump was going to order the military to actually execute a coup. They just didn't really take him up on this. There was no order, it was like an offhand comment and it was based on Trump's inflated idea of how many people would show up because it wasn't a million, it wasn't even 100,000, it was maybe 20,000, 25,000 people showed up on the mall that day.

Often with Trump, there's an element of real truth there that he then expands into total falsehood. He made a comment and it was not to protect the Capitol. From what I've learned from my reporting, he wanted those troops there to protect his supporters, it had nothing to do with the Capitol. He was afraid that Antifa or something would show up to go after his million supporters.

Brian: Let's go on to another lie about alleged election fraud that wasn't really election fraud that you have on the list. It's not from Trump or about the presidential election at all, or even about the 2020 election, even though this is your list from the last year. It's from Senator Rick Scott, Republican from Florida, who has said, quote, "In my race in 2018, they found 95,000 ballots after election night." Why was that a lie that made it onto your biggest Pinocchios of 2021 list? Since that was about the 2018 election, why did it make your list for this year?

Glenn: Because he keeps saying it. It's what we call a zombie claim. He was saying it in 2021 and we fact-checked it in 2021. It's noteworthy that it feeds into the-- he was using it as an example of how there's election fraud. Now, there have been many, many studies, there's virtually no election fraud. The American elections, in general, are very well run with few examples of fake voters or false voters or things like that. The kinds of things that Trump always talks about. A bigger problem might be that politicians impose restrictions to make it harder for people to vote.

Rick Scott has been saying this year after year, and we felt it was noteworthy to do a fact check of it in 2021. We also felt, given the election-related theme of the biggest Pinocchios, it was worth adding this year, maybe he will stop saying this. His basic claim is that 95,000 votes were found illegally after the polls were closed, but it's completely false. Florida officials investigated his claims, and these were officials appointed by Scott, and they never produced any evidence that supports what he said. Yet, like I said, he keeps saying it.

Brian: Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post Fact Checker with us with his biggest Pinocchios of 2021, we can take yours or your questions for him at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Before we get off election-related lies, you have one that is from Joe Biden that you put on your biggest Pinocchios list. This may surprise people. It's about the new Georgia election law, which I think many people do legitimately consider restrictive in a way that runs counter to voting rights, but you cite a lie from Joe Biden. The quote is, "Georgia's new law ends voting hours early so working people can't cast their vote." Give us the content for that and why it made your list of biggest Pinocchios of 2021.

Glenn: It is correct to say that there are a number of aspects in that Georgia law that do restrict voting or make it harder for people to vote. For instance, they reduced the number of drop boxes to just one in every county. There were certain counties, the populous counties where they had many drop boxes brought in during the pandemic. What we focused on was something that Biden said not once, not twice, but I think it was like three times. He said things like among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can't cast their vote after their shift is over.

It's sick deciding that you're going to end voting at five o'clock when working people are getting off work. We hold a president to a very high standard because they're the biggest megaphone on earth and there's simply nothing correct in what Biden said there. It was one of those instances where the White House never really-- they generally try to work hard with us to explain or defend what the president said. In this case, they never tried to defend what they said or what he said. He'd made it actually, even in a statement that he issued, which meant that it had been vetted by some officials and the law made some changes to early voting.

The net effect of these early voting rules was to expand opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not to limit it. That's what every expert we talked to said. He had some cause to complain about aspects of that law, but one of the things he focused on, and that he talked a number of times about was simply totally incorrect. That's why we put it on the list.

Brian: Here's a tweet from a listener who says, I love The Post's Fact Checker, but does he think there are any consequences these days for multiple Pinocchios? Does it feel thankless?

Glenn: [laughs] I've been doing this for 11 years and this is a question people always ask me. Actually, I have to say that in general, I know that President Biden is a reader of the Fact Checker because he's commented on it. Often, when we say this is incorrect, he stops saying it after we've done our fact check or he might adjust the way he says it. That reaction we would also see from people like President Obama, Hilary Clinton, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, just to name a few people, that pay attention to fact checks and are concerned about keeping their facts--

Brian: Some from each party. I notice you're mentioning there.

Glenn: Right, right.

Brian: If you've been doing this for 11 years, I'm curious if you think that media outlets have previously been more reluctant to just call a lie, a lie than they are today.

Glenn: No, I think Trump changed the standards there because you were faced with a politician who didn't seem to care that he was called out for saying things that were false and he would often double down or triple down. At some point, you got to the, do we declare that this is a lie? Now, the word lie is something that we rarely ever use at The Washington Post, let alone at the Fact Checker. Part of the problem with Trump is that he gets to believe his own lies and you can't get into someone's head. How do I know that they knowingly think that this is false?

One notable example is we declared it was a lie when he said he never paid money to his alleged paramours to keep them silent during the 2016 campaign. In that case, we made that decision to label it a lie because there were audio recordings released by his former aide, Michael Cohen, which showed him discussing the payments. We could with confidence say that was a lie. A lot of times, and you saw with Trump, there were policy implications because he would make policy decisions based on falsehoods that he himself had said so often that he came to believe it was true, even though it was demonstratively false.

Brian: I think the pressure to start calling a lie, a lie more explicitly in the press really started at least in the modern context, not under Trump, when everybody started doing it much more because his lies were so blatant like you say, but during Bush, when there were all these, what people considered lies about the Iraq war and they were too often couched in more subtle language. Remember Al Franken's book, the title was something like The Lying Liars and the Lies They Lie About? That isn't it exactly, but it was something like that. It had to do with the Bush Cheney regime.

Glenn: Right. Anyhow, but to be fair to Bush, and I once did a whole series where I talked about the biggest falsehood told by different presidents, and we went back to the Nixon and stuff. I did include the rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction by George W. Bush. A question that's never totally been answered is, did he know that when he was saying there were weapons of mass destruction that he knew there were none there? There was a lot of groupthink going on there, and he looked at the evidence and believed it was-- You can look now at what the intelligence report said. The intelligence reports in the Maine were saying yes, there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it was raised on lousy intelligence or lying defectors. There were the sense there by different agencies, particularly the Energy Department, saying, "No, these aluminum tubes have nothing to do with nuclear weapons." That was a caveat. You can fault them for a very bad decision-making, but can you sit there and say, "Oh, he knowingly knew that this was false," or was he just incompetent and didn't really fully read the full report? Just look at the summary.

Senator Bob Graham, he talked about how he was one of the very few senators to actually read the whole thing. He had to go to a secret bunker, a SCIF, as they call it, and read it. Couldn't take it out, couldn't bring staff. When he walked out of there, he decided this is all completely false or it's exaggerated. I'm not trying to defend George W. Bush, but I'm just trying to provide the context of how difficult it is to label something exactly as a lie.

Brian: Here's another one from this year that's on your biggest Pinocchios of 2021 list, "Officials are handing out Kamala Harris's book to migrants." Who said that, in what context? Why did it win a biggest Pinocchio?

Glenn: This was a fun piece, because what happened was the New York Post reported that a children's picture book written by Vice President Harris was being handed out in the welcome kits to young migrants at a shelter in Long Beach, California. It was like the front-page story of the New York Post with a picture of her book. Fox News ran with that, and then people like Senator Tom Cotton, and the Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel tweeted how horrible it was that the Biden administration was including the Vice President's book as part of a welcome kit.

We investigated it, and all it was, was there was one book of hers that had been donated to community of people helping migrants, and there happened to be a picture of the book sitting on a stack of things there. It's not part of any welcome kit. This was easily determined with a few phone calls.

Brian: Donated by a local community person, you're saying, not even by the White House.

Glenn: It was not part of any welcome kit. We published our fact check, the New York Post withdrew its story, and then the reporter resigned, tweeting that she'd been ordered to write this piece. As I recall, and I don't recall of the politicians like Tom Cotton or Ronna McDaniel ever withdrew their tweets or apologized. That was a fact check with consequence. It just shows how people want to believe something so much that they end up writing something that's false.

Brian: With Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, and his article, The Biggest Pinocchios of 2021, Sarah, in Norwalk, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi, there. Good morning. You may have actually addressed some of the things that I called in about just now, which most importantly, is calling lies, lies. Although, I appreciate that these are the Pinocchios and the reference there. It's very concerning that the press, it seems to me in general doesn't call lies what they are, and especially when they're such high consequence lies. You actually just dove deep into that topic a minute ago, which is what I had called in really about.

The other thing that I would mention is, beyond just calling it a lie, it would be interesting to see, I almost picture it like a table, an Excel table of seeing the particular lie, how many times it was repeated, and by whom. I think that would be a tough thing to do, but it speaks to the fact that what you have is this number of which it gets repeated by so many people that it's believed. I think that's something that the public really needs to understand, and not in subtle language at all, but really needs to get hit over the head with that message, not just subtly.

Brian: I'm so glad you brought that up, Sarah, because actually earlier in our conversation, Glenn, you mentioned, sometimes the statements that get Pinocchios in The Washington Post aren't things said by public officials, but things that go viral on social media, you have at least one of these on the list that I'll mention in a second. You want to talk about that context to Sarah's concern? Is social media itself sometimes the owner of a Pinocchio?

Glenn: In the decade that I've done this, social media has certainly become a bigger part of what we have to track and fact check. One thing we've specialized in is identifying manipulated video that might appear on social media feeds, or on YouTube. The Washington Post set out a whole scale for evaluating that, which has been adopted by Google to label things with. One big problem you have with social media is someone might take a little bit of a clip of, say, Joe Biden, and then label it misleadingly, and then it becomes like this meme, this happened.

Brian: One example you have of that on The Biggest Pinocchios of 2021 is a clip that was played on Tucker Carlson on Fox, of then Vice President Biden, to claim that Biden had some sort of secret plan to flood the United States with undocumented immigrants. You want to talk about that one?

Glenn: Yes. It was a six-minute Biden riff at the 2015 conference. When you looked at the full clip, Biden was actually saying the opposite of what Carlson claimed. Carlson had turned it into this whole secret plan to flood the United States with undocumented immigrants. As you know, we had a whole category or viral conspiracy claims about Biden. There was another one, a tweet that claimed that Biden and someone in Biden's earpiece told him to salute the Marines and Biden just repeated the words, "Salute the Marines." That went all over the place.

When we looked at the actual clip, what he really said was, "Good looking Marines."

Brian: This was at his inauguration or on inauguration day. Right?

Glenn: Right, but it was all part of this effort to paint Biden as this adult, old man controlled by his age. It was labeled that he said, "Salute the Marines," I think that's what people heard when they looked at it out of context, but he actually said something like they're different. One thing I should point out to the listener who called. During the Trump period, since we were documenting every false or misleading claim that Trump made, we did start running a list of what we call the bottomless Pinocchio, which if he said something more than 20 times that had been labeled with three or four Pinocchios just to get a feel for the propaganda nature of his rhetoric.

There was one claim he made, the false claim that he had created the greatest economy in US ultimately became in world history. That was something he said more than 500 times. There was literally at no level, could you make that claim. That [unintelligible 00:29:06] gave you a feel for the scope of how repetitive he was in advancing his falsehoods.

Brian: Last one, then we're out of time, about the newly elected Governor of Virginia. The lie was, Glenn Youngkin took over a chain of dental clinics that performed unnecessary procedures on children. What was that?

Glenn: That was Terry McAuliffe, who was the former governor who was trying to regain his seat. In Virginia, you can't serve consecutive terms, and he was running against this guy, Glenn Youngkin, who was a private equity investor. Terry McAuliffe was using the playbook that Obama used against Mitt Romney in 2012, which was to say, his business did all sorts of horrible things to ordinary people, but this was just flat out, made up when I looked into it. Youngkin had nothing to do with it and his company only made loans to this organization that had some issues with dental procedures.

In this race, both men earned many, many Pinocchios. They were throwing all sorts of falsehood at each other, but McAuliffe is known as a bit of an exaggerator. When he last ran for governor and he won, he also ended up on the biggest Pinocchio list for something he said about his Republican opponent, which was also completely made up. Anyway, in the end, he never lost.

Brian: Let me follow in one more because we didn't touch vaccine misinformation at all yet in this conversation. Maybe you don't need to, because our listeners know there's so much vaccine disinformation as well as misinformation, I guess. Well, do you make that distinction like misinformation is just stuff people get wrong, disinformation is stuff people purposely say that they know is wrong, and then talk about your category, which is Ron Johnson's campaign of vaccine misinformation?

Glen: Right. Ron Johnson is a purveyor of all sorts of false and misleading claims about the coronavirus.

Brian: Republican Senator from Wisconsin.

Glen: Right. We had done a number of fact checks explaining over and over why what he was saying was wrong. He would often say there would've been more than 5,000 deaths reported to this and that he's referring to something known as the vaccine adverse event reporting system, but there's no causal link. It's just like anyone can make a statement there or a claim, but he was acting as if it was real. It was a part of an effort to discourage people from taking the vaccines. We felt it was important to call him out for that.

Brian: On misinformation versus disinformation, how do you choose which word to use?

Glen: Well, disinformation, I'm not sure in the end, how important it is. In this case, every time we spoke to Ron Johnson and his staff, they were able to throw at us studies or documents or things like that to defend what he was saying. The problem is there could be 100 studies done. If you only pick the one study that supports what you're saying and ignore the 99 others that say that what you're saying is wrong, is that disinformation or is that purposely misinforming people?

Brian: Glen Kessler, Washington Post Fact Checker. His article, The Biggest Pinocchios of 2021. Thanks for sharing them with us.

Glen: You're welcome.

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