About last year: PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute, bestowed another odious distinction on President-elect Donald Trump. The organization dubbed a statement uttered by Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance the “Lie of the Year.”

PolitiFact has christened a Lie of the Year every year since 2009, and in only two of those years did statements made by Democrats earn the top prize. In 2011, PolitiFact slammed Democrats for claiming that Republicans would vote to end Medicare, and in 2013, the organization concluded that President Barack Obama’s solemn promise—”If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”—was plainly untrue. But in every other year, PolitiFact has singled out right-leaning purveyors of mistruths.

This year is no different. In 2024, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year is the claim by Trump that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town were “eating people’s pets.”

“With a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats,” observes the organization.

The Republican ticket’s disregard for the facts in this case was indeed brazen. It was completely untrue that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet dogs and cats. What happened was that various concerns about migrants supposedly hunting birds in public parks in Springfield, Ohio, got lumped together with an unrelated story of someone killing a pet cat in a completely different town. It’s a textbook example of why you shouldn’t automatically believe everything you see on social media. Trump and Vance did real harm here, and it’s absolutely fair to call them out for smearing the immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio.

But was this really the Lie of the Year?

Liar, Liar

Given recent revelations about the extent to which President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was well-known to his staff—and covered up by them—at the very onset of his presidency, one might think that repeated statements to the contrary might be worthy of “Lie of the Year.”

The lie, peddled at the behest of Biden’s aides and advisors, and sold by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to a gullible and incurious mainstream media, was that President Biden remained fit for office—and that mounting public concerns about his age-related decline were based on misinformation. Well before Biden’s historic collapse at the June presidential debate, a majority of Americans expressed serious reservations about Biden’s ability to serve. When reporters pressed Biden’s media surrogates about these polls, they insisted that the supposed evidence of the president’s decline was being fabricated by his political enemies. Jean-Pierre thunderously attacked conservative media, and Fox News in particular, for circulating what she described as misleading videos that appeared to show Biden out of sorts.

At the highest levels

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Article from Reason.com

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