Early in his career our guest, Bill Adair, worked as a journalist, author, and later founded the fact-checking organization Politifact. And in 2013 he accepted a position at Duke University as the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, where he now teaches journalism in the Sanford School of Public Policy and directs the Duke Reporters’ Lab. We discuss the negative effects of lying in politics, different types of lies, why people fall for lies, how fact-checking works, the response of journalists to political lying, and his recent book: Beyond the Big Lie-The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.

Untrue information is called misinformation, and intentionally spread misinformation is known as disinformation. When one uses disinformation to further one’s own agenda, especially in the political realm, then the information has been weaponized. And the continued acceleration of weaponized information further erodes our trust in experts, media, and other institutional sources of accurate information, and severely damages the social trust required for a healthy democracy. The “code red” conditions now prevalent in America motivate us to revisit an episode of Thinking Clearly (from May of 2022), which explores the "Nature of Trust", and to include new, updated comments from the present.

This episode looks back to the previous episode: # 22- Worldview-The Elephant in the Room of Critical Thinking, and updates it from the perspective of 2025.