The truth took a big hit in the year we just passed into the rearview mirror, so much so that PolitiFact, which had awarded — if you want to call it that — a Lie of the Year award since 2009, named 2025 The Year of Lies. Many of the falsehoods in 2025 reached the fact-checking news organization’s threshold for being significant: they were repeated often and demonstrably false and consequential.
Being consequential was key to these big lies because they negatively affected the lives of several people.
PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders took time to talk about that in this video podcast. We spoke on Dec. 30.
Lyle: As you point out in a number of articles at Politifact, the last decade has been a bit of a firehose for falsities, and I want to talk to you at the end about 2026, especially with AI and the ability to produce falsehoods in a very short period of time with perhaps the imagination of a person being the only gate.
Katie: Sure.
Lyle: Let’s start with the Year of the Lies. How did that all come about?
Katie: Well, we went about choosing our Lie of the Year the way we usually do. I round up a list of what I think stood out in terms of the most egregious falsehoods of the year, the most ridiculous, but also the ones that like weren’t just one-offs. They had real significance.
So we had a pretty long list — longer than usual — but we’ve had long lists in the past. I mean, we all were there for the 2024 campaign and COVID, and you know, we’ve had a tumultuous decade, as I said in the column. So that part wasn’t unusual. But, when we were talking about how to isolate one, both with our staff just to have the discussion, and then with our leadership at Poynter and Politifact who decide by the year, we just felt it was, I think the word is insufficient, to declare one as more significant and more impactful than all the others because there were just so many strong candidates in the running. And so, it felt like a good time to step back from our annual exercise and try to make a different point about why lies are harmful and why we do this. And, that’s because lies can harm real people. So, we just thought it was time to shake it up because of the moment we’re in is not a moment, it’s an era, and we have to try to get people to care about it.
Lyle: Well, few things can really make you feel good about a year than a story that starts with: “The concept of truth feels particularly bleak in 2025. Government leaders deploy up-is-down narratives at an exhausting clip. Online worlds drip with artificial intelligence-generated slop that incites rage. Chatbots answer questions with fabricated information, and the government folds it into a report card on America’s health.”
And, it seems like that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as problems that have existed with keeping a focus on what really is a fact.
Katie: Those are all examples from 2025. And, like you said, those are just the items that I linked to in the sentences that are just the tip of the iceberg. … It was day after day. Just the steady drumbeat of what you’re seeing with your own eyes is not real, and what we were caught doing we didn’t do. I guess they did go back and change the MAHA report (Make Our Children Healthy Again) that was informed by some AI hallucinations.
Thank you for mentioning the top of the column, because … that was almost the easiest part to write, because it was, just as an observer, looking out for facts every day, that’s that’s how it felt. It felt like an assault on every front.
“LIE OF THE YEAR” STARTED WITH SARAH PALIN
Lyle: This is the 17th year that you would have been looking at lie of the year. Can you take us through a little bit of a history about lie of the year?
Katie: Sure. It predates me in my time at Politifact. It started in 2009. We were, the country was in the throes of a vigorous healthcare debate. … The first Lie of the Year went to Sarah Palin’s claim that the Affordable Care Act had death panels, and that was just, I think, very memorable choice. Again, I wasn’t there until a few years later … The Tampa Bay Times at the time had this idea to step back and kind of have a marketing moment. And so, somebody thought of the term Lie of the Year, and they decided to make it an annual tradition to single out a falsehood that really had a lot to teach us about the year that that we had in political rhetoric.
Lyle: … Who’s responsible for all of these lies, because it would be easy to say the last 10 years Donald Trump. But, that’s too easy of an answer, isn’t it?
Katie: It is, yes. I don’t want to diminish Trump’s role in shaping the, you know, the nature of our discourse. He … has a penchant for flouting the facts, not letting facts get in the way of a talking point, or many talking points that he likes. No politician has earned the Lie of the Year accolade more than Donald Trump. He’s either won the award outright or shared in it several times since the political scene.
Lyle: Yeah, he certainly is good at understanding that a lie is useful.
Katie: He’s very good at it. But like I said, the roots of Lie of the Year go back to 2009 so the lying predated Donald Trump. It will come after him as well but he just has a very different relationship to it. But, I think that the point that we also make in the column this year — and in the approach — is that our dire information ecosystem isn’t entirely directed or dependent on Donald Trump as president. You mentioned that we were going to talk about generative AI and how you can, you can invent a viral, convincing falsehood with sophisticated AI — generated imagery and visuals and video like that. You don’t have to be an expert in cutting video or illustration or anything like that.
So, we’re going to run into a new front in fake news, to kind of use an old term. And the column makes the point that, you know, we may not have arrived at our … moment of catastrophe with AI, where something so fake has gone so viral and caused this destruction. I feel like that’s been something we’ve heard researchers and journalists warn about for many years now with the rise of deep fake technology, but it did feel in 2025 that we are closer than ever. And, there are several little moments that I talk about in the column. But, there are many, many more examples behind it that show how people on both sides of the political aisle share responsibility for identifying fake stuff online. And, we’re very bad at it collectively. We’re still very bad at it. We have not developed the media literacy skills that help us discern and stop and pause before taking something online at face value. There are a lot of innocuous examples that we kind of cover day to day at PolitiFact.
I argue they’re seemingly innocuous: … older Americans at a facility dressed up in funny Halloween costumes that got so many of my friends because it looked so hyper-realistic. It might have gotten me at first too, because I’m, you know, scrolling Instagram like everyone else, time to time. But I look back at that moment and think that that could have been something else that generated a positive response of people saying, “Oh, this is so funny. Share it.” What if it generated different response but it was entirely fabricated. That’s where I get really uncomfortable and kind of fearful about what’s next in 2026 if we don’t become a bit more sophisticated.
Lyle: I want to talk about some of the examples that you have in your column. But first, it’s really important to understand the three criteria that PolitiFact looks at for the Lie of the Year, or the Year of the Lies. And, one of them is consequences. Can you take us through the criteria and how you weighed the things that were spoken that weren’t true?
LIES’ CONSEQUENCES CARRY WEIGHT
Katie: Well, consequences is probably the most important element of this year’s Year of the Lies. I felt like that was the word in the writing and editing of the piece and the associated pieces about humans that were affected by false talking points. That really captured our interest the most this year, was illustrating the consequences. … Usually we will look at the top kind of options for Lie of the Year, we will, our very small committee of about three people, will kind of argue what we think it should be. And, we kind of decide: Yeah, okay, this makes the most sense because it speaks to the criteria of being significant. It’s not going to surprise everyone. Like, everyone knows this one, it was prominent and it had significant consequences. And, we’ve weighed consequences in the past with our selection of COVID-19 falsehoods and denials and downplay or Jan. 6 downplay and denials. But this year, it just didn’t feel like it was enough to kind of retrace the anatomy of the talking point and talk to experts about what this says about our misinformation ecosystem.
I’ve written that story or edited that story many times now, and it just felt like we should really focus on one of the key elements of this selection, which is consequences. So we ended up doing a more ambitious package of multiple stories by multiple reporters, which was hard at the moment, but, you know, felt really good once we started rolling it out day after day and giving our readers something new to chew on each day.
Lyle: And those criteria: repeated often, demonstrably false and perhaps above all, consequential. And so, one of the consequential items that you had was a farmer in North Dakota, which would be of interest in Iowa as well — a farmer who had grain in, ready to be sold to an international buyer, and the Trump tariffs and foreign policy come into play. Do you remember that one at all, that farmer?
Katie: Sure. I remember Randy Richards. I didn’t interview him. My colleague, senior correspondent, Amy Sherman, did. …We weren’t examining the impact of tariffs as policy. That wasn’t the point but it was the framing of the tariff policy.
So, Donald Trump sold this, the idea of tariffs, as being a tax on foreign countries that would make Americans, especially farmers, richer. So we went out to find a farmer, to find their experience, and we found multiple farmers across multiple states who had said in the media in various ways that this was not how it was working out. And so, Randy Richards was willing to talk to us. He was willing to be on video with us, which was one of our important criteria for select for voices to highlight. We wanted to do videos in the package. So Randy was comfortable with that.
But we don’t cover the soybean industry day in, day out, at PolitiFact so we had a lot to learn about how these talking points hit Randy Richards during the campaign when Trump was arguing to retake the White House. And, then we got his reaction as he heard Trump from the inauguration on say: this is how the tariffs are going to work, and it’s going to be great for farmers, and they should go out and buy lots of equipment, and, you know, prepare to make even more, make even more soybeans, or whatever the product is.
I think the memorable quote from Randy Richards was, “that’s about as far from the truth as you can get,” when he heard Trump’s rhetoric kind of played back to him, because that had just not been his experience.
He and many of his peers were forced to confront the year with a lot of uncertainty. I think that was the dominant feeling for them: economic uncertainty. An then, just trying to follow the political tea leaves as China retaliated from Trump’s tariffs. That really hurt them. And, it was something that economists and trade groups had warned about for a very long time. But the Trump administration, not just Trump but his ag secretary and other economic officials said: it’s going to be great, money will come pouring in. And what the experience shows is that that did not happen for farmers, and it’s not happened off the the wallets of foreign entities. It was from Americans.
Lyle: So, for Randy Richards, that affected his lively income. But you also have in the story the reference of Dr. Mona Amin … a pediatrician in Florida who gets out. And, now we’re talking about health as well as a livelihood. Can you expand a little bit about that?
Katie: Sure, I think we have a pretty rich tradition of covering health claims, both health claims that go viral online and also health claims that are coming from our elected leaders or the people seeking office.
Lyle: A health claim was a Lie of the Year two years ago.
Katie: So, that’s what I’m backing into. We had a lot of health policy winners from the Affordable Care Act debates back in the day, and then in 2020 we named COVID-19 claims en masse the Lie of the Year.
And then in 2023, we named the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign as the winner of the Lie of the Year for the misstatements and conspiracy theories that he was promoting as part of his campaign. It was with that kind of like background knowledge that we approached 2025 and the new administration over health and human services that had a dizzying amount of health policy changes. And, those have real trickle down effects and cause real friction in the doctor’s office between patient and doctor, patient and provider.
We’re based here in Florida, where there’s there’s even more kind of chaos, with our state leaders embracing this movement from the federal government and taking it even further in terms of changing up the vaccine schedule. And so, we we thought about parents, and we thought about providers who were dealing with the consequences of this harmful speech and are putting themselves in moments of tension with patients who are hearing one thing from the President of the United States about something like Tylenol and it’s appropriate use for people who are pregnant, and then hearing another thing from their doctor. We wanted to learn what is that like? And, we worked really hard to find a doctor who is comfortable talking about this on the record, because a lot of people are are not willing to do that to jeopardize their their employment.
We found Dr. Amin because she is based in South Florida but she’s also very comfortable, she’s more outspoken. She has her own social media account that is very successful, where she talks to parents directly about things that she was hearing from the federal government. And, she opened up about just how exhausting it is to be attending a school event for your child and then get all these texts from your colleagues in the field, and just looking down your phone and being like, what now? Like, what do I have to deal with now? Because it just complicates that relationship and adds a lot of stress at a moment at a very stressful time for new parents.
IMMIGRATION RHETORIC FULL OF LIES
Lyle: Then you talk about immigration in Iowa, I’ve been covering immigration, and there are meat packing plants here, a farm economy with farm workers. In Nebraska, nearby, a town is suffering with problems at the Tyson plant and raids. Do you have any idea? Can you recall over the year how many lies that PolitiFact investigated that were related to immigration?
Katie: I couldn’t tell you the lies, and that’s because we only name Lie of the Year once a year. I will say we covered 150 plus immigration stories or explainers, I should say fact checks or like explainers, that didn’t have a rating, and that’s a that’s a very steady commitment to a topic that is generating non-stop news. And so I think an immigration story felt very appropriate in 2025, say the least, and I think it’s something we had our eye on coming out of the 2024 campaign.
Trump had promised to launch the largest deportation effort in history while, at the same time, prioritizing violent criminals who did all manner of things that he described in every campaign stop. Along the way, or towards the end, as he was taking office, journalists started to ask Trump and other officials, like, how are you going to do that? What about people who are just in the country unlawfully? Where does that leave them? And you started to see the dissonance. And so, it wasn’t something that officials led with as they talked about their successful raids here or there, or crackdowns in cities across the country. They always trumpet the violent criminals, and they did find and have deported some violent criminals along the way.
But, I think doing this at the end of the year really gave us and many other outlets who have reported on the worst of the worst narrative, the data from the Department of Homeland Security, itself, to show that, far and away, most people being detained have no criminal convictions on their record, which is so far and away from the headlines of their, the news releases of their operations in the U.S. this year, and certainly miles away from how it was described on the campaign.
So, our third story about immigration and the worst of the worst narrative was, for me, a really important one for us to do. It was just something that also felt like there’s a new story, a new example every day, if not multiple times a day, in your own newsfeed, of that talking point ringing hollow.
Lyle: And we have seen this in Iowa, where the consequences of that have been huge, with people being taken out of their communities, sent to Guatemala, or wherever it is that they get sent, after they’ve been taken away. Some of them, they’ve been here, as you pointed out in your stories asyoung, kids when they went to school and whatnot. Do you see that immigration will be top-shelf topic for PolitiFact again in the coming year?
Katie: Absolutely, yeah. I think it will be. You know, it’s a tricky issue and I’m not going to dissect it entirely. I think that’s a really interesting topic. But, it was a defining issue in 2024 in the election, along with the economy, and that’s what helped Trump take office, was his promise to have a crackdown on immigration, right? And, I think it does put Democrats in an awkward position when you say, like, “Oh, do you want these violent criminals to remain in society?” You know, I don’t think that they have developed very efficient talking point to counter that. But, I think the manner in which the deportation operation has been implemented this past year surely will be a midterm issue.
So, what I’m trying to say is that immigration was our 2024 Lie of the Year, which was about the Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs, which was not true out of Springfield, Ohio. It played a role in our Year of the Lie series this year. And I wouldn’t be surprised for it to be in the contention, somehow, for a year-end conversation about truth and politics in 2026. It’s just a massive issue.
Lyle: Before we get into 2026 and wrap it up, would you take us through the procedures that PolitiFact goes through to check statement? I think that would be important for people to know.
HOW POLITIFACT CHECKS STATEMENTS
Katie: Sure. … We monitor political discourse every day. We’re on social media. We follow everything coming out of the White House, like, we assign one person each day to take turns monitoring what Trump is saying publicly. We follow leaders of Congress. In election years, we divide up key campaigns and we get their news releases. We follow their debates, campaigns, and ads and that kind of thing. So, there’s a world of places to get our ideas.
The first step is choosing your idea. So we try to focus on statements that are, you know, not easy gotchas. They can’t be predictions. They have to be statements that are important, that are kind of worth dedicating a day or several days to investigating. Or, they at least have to not be obviously true as well. They have to make the average person go, “Huh? I wonder if that’s really true?” and maybe the answer is not apparent after a quick Google search.
So, once we decide on our we call it a ruling statement on a claim that we’re investigating, we go to the campaign or the candidate or the leader, the politician, and we ask them or their staff, what is the evidence for the statement? We talk to the White House a lot and sometimes they will reply with a statement. Sometimes the statement is not necessarily directly relevant to our question, but we will try to accommodate some version of the statement in our fact check. Sometimes, we do link to specific studies or news articles, then we go reference that and, sometimes, they just don’t reply.
But that doesn’t stop us and, usually, we’re not waiting to hear back from whoever we’re fact checking. We are well on to doing our own research and that’s really important. We scan for academic journal articles, we consult experts at think tanks, whether it’s tariffs or immigration or health or any other topic. We’re trying to find people who know that subject area really well. They’ve either commented about it in the news media, they’ve written articles about it, or they may have a dissenting view from from experts who are quoted a lot.
We try to not just quote a lot of people saying the same thing. We try to make sure we’re covering a talking point from all angles. If we can find consensus from experts who tend to disagree, we know we’ve done something right.
So, we go through this kind of exhaustive reporting process, and then we fold our findings into a into a fact check. The fact check ends with a quick explanation of our conclusion on the Truth-O-Meter. It explains what rating we chose and, succinctly, why we chose it. There’s six different ratings. Each one has a definition. You can find it on our website, politifact.com: true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, or Pants on Fire, which means the statements not only wrong, but it’s ridiculous.
And those ratings, by the way, are not just the decision of one reporter and whatever they decided to rate it that day. It’s a result of a conversation between three editors. The reporter can recommend a rating based on their reporting. They’re very close to the story, obviously, but the editors decide. They vet the story for any potential errors, errors in logic errors, you know, certainly grammatical errors. But we’re looking for what will the critics say about this, and where might they have a point. We’re trying to bulletproof the story, as a lot of people call it, and then we decide as editors, what rating. So, it only takes two out of the three editors to nail the rating down.
Lyle: But the process can be quite grueling at times, can it not?
Katie: It is grueling, yes. I’ve been part of PolitiFact since 2012, officially. So, I’ve sat in many star chambers, as we call them, as a reporter who’s having their story grilled for many years, and more recently, as an editor doing the grilling. And you know, I think, honestly, it’s, never fun to be the reporter in that position. But you also know, like, your story is being analyzed very closely at this stage. It should make you feel much better about going to publication.
… Lyle: I do want to wrap up with this: 2026, now as we look forward to this new year playing out, have you and the staff at PolitiFact talked about what to possibly expect for the coming year? …
Katie: We’ve talked about how we will approach some key midterm races. We’ve had preliminary conversations about that. We’ve talked about continuing to prioritize health and covering health in a different format that might reach people who are more skeptical of traditional fact checking, but may be more receptive to proactive information sharing to counter online, to counter all the concerning videos they see on their social media feeds. And, we’ve talked about continuing to cover AI at a steady level that kind of keeps up with explaining new developments and challenges with the technology. We ended the year with a really powerful story about chat bots and teens, kind of vulnerable teens, who use chat bots to navigate personal mental health crises to pretty tragic results where they have taken their own lives. So we will continue to cover the impact of AI very seriously. I would say that those are our main priorities, with another big one being covering the daily developments out of Washington.
Lyle: Lie or not. Is Chat box GPT (ChatGPT) and other AI programming taking our information and storing it? Do you know?
Katie: Lie or not? I don’t think that’s a lie. I don’t know, it’s complicated, but I would be, I would, just as a PSA, be very mindful about whatever you put into a chat bot. You never know where it could pop up again, especially if you’re not using a paid version. And then, even if you are, it’s not yours to have privately for all of time. Be very careful out there.
Lyle: Katie, thank you for taking the time out for me. I really appreciate it, and I think this will be very useful for the people who are reading what I’m writing now and viewing it. I appreciate taking the time out for me.
Katie: Great. Well, thank you so much for asking It’s a pleasure to talk to you.
ANSWERING THE PERSONAL INFORMATION QUESTION
I asked ChatGPT if it saves personal information. Here is the response:
Lyle: Do you store information we input into ChatGPT?
ChatGPT: Short answer: sometimes—but not in the way most people imagine.
Here’s the clean breakdown 👇
During a conversation
Yes, I can remember things within the same chat so the conversation makes sense.
That context disappears when the conversation ends.
Across conversations (memory)
I don’t automatically store personal information you type.
I only save things if you explicitly ask me to, like:
“Remember that my kid’s name is Ruby”
“From now on, keep replies short”
When something is saved, it shows up as a small “memory” tied to your account and helps personalize future chats.
You can ask me what I remember or tell me to delete anything at any time.
Training the model
Your chats may be reviewed or used to improve ChatGPT, but:
They’re handled under privacy controls
They aren’t used to personally identify you
You can opt out of chat history being used for training in Settings → Data Controls.
Important reassurance
I don’t have awareness of you outside what’s in a conversation or what you’ve explicitly asked me to remember.
I can’t browse your past chats unless they’re in your visible chat history.
I don’t secretly build a profile of you.
If you want, I can:
Tell you exactly what I currently remember about you (spoiler: it’s basically nothing right now)
Walk you through the privacy and data settings step-by-step
Totally fair question, by the way—more people should ask it.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence source and not a person. I, however, I am living and breathing person and a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Meet our amazing writers, all real people and among the best in the Midwest, here.
