President Biden earns his first Bottomless Pinocchio President Biden is a self-described "gaffe machine." That's no excuse, of course, for a president making false or misleading statements. Readers have asked for fact checks of a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check. So we produced a roundup of some of the president's recent errors of fact, made as he has barnstormed the country boosting Democrats and raising contributions in advance of the midterm elections. Most noteworthy was an old claim we had debunked shortly after Biden took office, giving him Three Pinocchios — that he had traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese president Xi Jinping. There is no evidence Biden traveled that much with Xi, the president of China — and even if we added up the miles Biden flew to see Xi, it still did not total 17,000 miles. The White House could not offer an explanation for that number either. On Nov. 3, the president said it again. That meant he had said it 20 times during his presidency. Readers may recall that during Donald Trump's presidency, we established a new category, the Bottomless Pinocchio, to account for false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda. A statement would get added to the list if it had earned a Three or Four Pinocchios rating and been repeated at least 20 times. Now Biden has earned his own Bottomless Pinocchio. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Here's why the Associated Press plays a role in 'calling' elections The Fox affiliate in Phoenix last month accidentally aired during a live broadcast a test election result from the Associated Press showing the Democratic candidate for governor winning that state's hard-fought election. The incident drew outrage from Republicans on social media, although the station quickly acknowledged the mistake: "This graphic was never meant to go on air — the numbers were only part of a test. The station has taken steps to make sure this cannot happen again." The AP reports election results that are provided by state and local officials, using its vast network of employees and affiliates. At a certain point, based on how many votes remain to be counted, AP may conclude that a candidate is the winner because no other candidate can catch up. That's newsworthy. But the AP does not engage in speculation or projections. And no election is official until all of the votes are counted and the election results are certified. The AP's singular place in conveying U.S. election results dates back to the mid-19th century. It was created in 1846 largely as a result of the invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse a couple years earlier. Meanwhile, in 1845, Congress passed a law that for the first time set a national Election Day, replacing a previous 34-day window. Thus in 1848 the AP was in place to report on the first presidential election that took place on a single day. It spent the then-astronomical sum of $1,000 on telegraph tolls to pool information on election results from local newspapers in the 30 states that voted then. To this day, the United States has no central election authority, with elections run by more than 8,000 local governments. That has kept the AP central to the reporting of news on elections. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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