News Beat
Top political fact-checking website explains why editors have dubbed 2025 the ‘Year of the Lies’
A top political fact-checking has dubbed 2025 the “Year of the Lies,” due to the sheer volume of mistruths and false information that has been spread by politicians.
Since 2009, PolitiFact has published its annual “Lie of the Year,” taken from its own analysis as well as submissions from the general public.
“We’ve been doing this for a long time, and the volume and severity of the inaccurate claims was just overwhelming, and we felt that it was insufficient to name just one our lie of the year,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact.
“We wanted to catch people’s attention and take stock of the times we’re in, and so we thought renaming it and giving it a different purpose might do that.”
PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” has previously been published to highlight a statement or collection of statements “that is worthy of note for a consequential undermining of reality.” This year, singling out one specific statement has not been possible, Sanders said.
Though Sanders highlighted several statements from the Trump administration, including his claims about the dangers of pregnant women taking Tylenol and the crackdown on violent criminals, as being worthy of note, she added that PolitiFact examines alleged lies from both sides of the political aisle.
In 2025, options for the top lie include Trump’s baseless justifications for deadly boat strikes off Venezuela’s coast, but also Democratic Governor JB Pritzker’s assessment of food stamp “SNAP machines.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim of “no starvation” in Gaza was also considered to be one of the year’s biggest and most blatant lies.
“Yes, we’re spotlighting several statements from the Trump administration, but the lows of the year for political rhetoric and influential speech are not the White House’s alone,” Sanders told PBS.
“We’re contending with a really fraught online information environment where AI slop is abundant, misleading out of context, narratives abound, and you just can’t believe what you see, and we worry that people are too numb to the drumbeat of misinformation.
“That is very dangerous, frankly, for us to be in and so I hope that our ‘Year of the Lies’ catches people’s attention and reminds them why it’s important to improve media literacy and pause before taking everything at face value.”
PolitiFact highlighted three examples of instances where lies have had serious implications for real people, including a soybean farmer affected by tariff uncertainty, a pediatrician who was forced to quit her job, and two Salvadorian brothers seeking asylum who were branded “the worst of the worst” and deported.
In 2024, Trump and his running mate JD Vance’s claim that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, took the title of “Lie of the Year,” though the president now has four such titles as well as three supporting roles.
