How to make lying unpopular in politics

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TThe general election campaign is underway, filling our airwaves, web pages and mailboxes with attack ads, often fueled by lies.

We see them at every election: TV commercials with ominous voiceovers and grainy black-and-white photos and flyers with cherry-picked quotes and dramatic headlines. We roll our eyes and accept the lie as an inevitable part of our messy democracy.

But the lie matters. It poisons our discourse, breeds cynicism about government and makes it difficult to have serious conversations about the issues of the day. If politicians lie about issues like immigration and the climate, they cannot agree on common facts that allow them to work together to find solutions.

I’ve spent much of my career studying lying, first as the founder of the fact-checking site PolitiFact and more recently as the author of a book about how and why politicians lie. I have come to the conclusion that politicians lie because they think it pays dividends. Earn points with your base and help them get rewarded by their donors. There are few, if any, consequences. Although academic researchers have found that fact-checking can be effective in correcting misperceptions, political journalists and independent fact-checkers cannot keep up with the volume of claims. The partisan media either ignores the lies or repeats them because they provoke anger and keep viewers and readers coming back.

But we can change the dynamic, specifically by making lying politically unpopular.

We can take a cue from Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, the conservative anti-tax group. Norquist, a longtime Washington power broker, is the enforcer of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a pledge “to oppose any tax increase” that is signed by the vast majority of senators Republicans and members of the House, as well as by many other GOP candidates and officeholders. By celebrating the signers and trying to pressure the resisters, Norquist has been a singular force in establishing the GOP’s anti-tax culture.

You may not agree with the politics of his anti-tax pledge, but it shows how peer pressure and party culture create change. Now, let’s think about fighting the lie again. If candidates and elected officials faced the same pressure about the lie that Republicans feel about opposing taxes, it might become part of their core beliefs and make them think twice about filling out the polls. its advertisements and brochures with falsehoods.

Read more: 9 ways to respond to political misinformation

In fact, to reduce lying, you need to change the incentives and build an anti-lying culture on both sides. (Although my research finds that Republicans lie more, Democrats produce a lot of bullshit. The pledge must be bipartisan.)

I am not the first to propose this idea. A group called Intentional Insights tried something similar in 2017, the Pro-Truth Pledge, but it didn’t get the visibility or critical mass of signers it needed.

A lying pledge—it could be a relatively simple promise that the candidate or official would not lie in campaign materials or in the media—would require an organization to track signers. Peer pressure and voter interest would then apply. Candidates could brag about their commitment in ads and speeches, as many of Norquist’s signatories do. They could cause an uproar over opponents who won’t sign.

The implementation of the commitment would be left to public opinion. Take it from someone who, as editor of PolitiFact, was often accused of being “the arbiter of truth”: It would get messy if a single organization tried to determine who broke the promise. But the group doesn’t need to get into that thicket. Just keep track of the signers and you can leave the determination of the liars to public opinion.

Opponents and rival parties would surely seize every opportunity to denounce a violation. Reporters and fact-checkers could then explore the complaints in the same way they do for claims of corruption or other allegations. The debate—even an extended brouhaha about a rape accused—will raise the profile of the lie. Voters will be waiting for that. The result: fewer lies.

from Beyond the big lie by Bill Adair, published by Atria Atria Publishing Group, a division of Simon & Schuster. Copyright (c) 2024 by Bill Adair

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