Pinocchio's big year Drumroll, please. It's time for our annual awards: the biggest Pinocchios! We had a ton of worthy candidates this year, what with President Trump's fact-free...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Pinocchio's big year Drumroll, please. It's time for our annual awards: the biggest Pinocchios! We had a ton of worthy candidates this year, what with President Trump's fact-free antics, a bunch of elections across the country, midterm attack ads galore, and incipient moves from 2020 presidential hopefuls. Trump's torrent of falsehoods eclipses everything else. The president amassed Pinocchios like a Hungry Hungry Hippos champion in 2018. We counted 1,419 false or misleading claims from Trump just in the seven weeks leading up to the midterms. For the first time, we branded one of his statements a lie: He knew about the hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign to two women with whom he allegedly had affairs, contrary to his repeated denials. There is so much more — rampant false claims about immigrants, made-up stories about political opponents, wildly inflated numbers on a host of different issues — and we had to be careful not to let the president swamp this list. So, rounding out the biggest Pinocchios of the year, we have claims from Sens. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, two potential 2020 presidential contenders; a false attack ad claiming Sen. Robert Menendez slept with underage sex workers; an incredibly deceptive ad by the DCCC accusing a GOP congressman of voting to repeal Obamacare when in fact he voted the opposite way; the kooky tale of "Cocaine Mitch"; a special award for Republicans who lied about our Pinocchio ratings to score campaign points; and more. A lot more. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Pinocchio grows up No matter how many times a Trump claim is debunked, the president tends to keep repeating it. What's a fact-checker to do in the face of deliberate disinformation? Four Pinocchios sometimes doesn't cut it, so we added a new category to our scale: the Bottomless Pinocchio. To receive a Bottomless Pinocchio, a claim must have gotten Three or Four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker and must be repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware the facts are wrong. We created a new landing page where all the Bottomless Pinocchios will be featured. For the moment, only one politician, Donald Trump, makes the cut. In fact, we gave him 14 different Bottomless Pinocchios, for claiming more than 100 times that his tax cut in 2017 was the biggest in history, for overstating trade deficits more than 100 times, for claiming falsely more than 80 times that a border wall is already under construction, for insisting more than 30 times that U.S. Steel is opening six to nine new plants when the real number is zero, and for various other serial falsehoods. | |  | | Teaching to the tweet There's an interesting effort in France to teach students how to spot misinformation online. The government has been increasing funding for these programs since 2015. The New York Times wrote about one such class in a town near Lyon. A journalist walked through five different tweets with a group of teenage students and explained how to fact-check the information they contained. "About 30,000 teachers and other educational professionals receive government training on the subject every year," the Times reported. "In some places, the local authorities require young adults to complete an internet literacy course to receive welfare benefits, such as a monthly stipend." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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