A New Category of Lie: The Bottomless Pinocchio

Trump’s 14 Bottomless Pinocchio lies

The Washington Post fact checker has instituted a new category of political lie. WaPo writes:

“Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category — the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.

The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: The claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/fact-checker-most-repeated-disinformation/?utm_term=.5636f7c7acab ).

The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list.”

It is good to see fact checkers applying rigorous standards to political lying.[1] This is more evidence that as a lying politician, Trump is both qualitatively and quantitatively different than any other politician. In his blatant contempt for truth and reason, Trump is unique, at least since the rise of fact checking, if not in all American history

. Footnote:
1. If it were up to B&B, the number of repeat lies to establish campaigns of disinformation would be ten. Once a lie has been repeated on ten separate occasions, that is sufficient evidence for rational people to call it a disinformation campaign.

B&B orig: 12/10/18