"While the choice is clear many years, the PolitiFact team still goes through a painstaking process before choosing the biggest lie. They have meetings, do thorough research and reporting, talk to various experts and sources, have more meetings and poll readers. PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders tells me the first meeting about this year's Lie of the Year actually happened in October."
"This year, the task felt overwhelming. The lies piled up and there seemed to be a greater force than just a single lie, like we've seen in recent years, such as when Republicans claimed Haitian immigrants were eating pets or the downplaying of COVID-19 or Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification for invading Ukraine. So, for 2025, PolitiFact tried to recalibrate."
""This annual exercise isn't about finding the most ridiculous of claims; that pool is as wide as the ocean. Our criteria has always been finding claims that tick three key boxes: They are repeated often, demonstrably false and, perhaps above all, consequential." But where to even start in 2025, where lies have become a common practice in our politics? With that in mind, PolitiFact is calling 2025 " The Year of the Lies.""
PolitiFact carried out a months-long selection process for the 2025 Lie of the Year that included meetings, extensive reporting, expert interviews and reader polling. The 2025 cycle presented an overwhelming volume of falsehoods that functioned as a broader phenomenon rather than a single claim. Examples of prior impactful lies include false claims about Haitian immigrants, COVID-19 downplaying and Putin's justification for invading Ukraine. The selection applied three criteria: repeated dissemination, demonstrable falsehood and clear consequences. The organization labeled 2025 "The Year of the Lies" and scheduled a week-long rollout of related stories and a season finale podcast conversation.
Read at Poynter
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]