PolitiFact’s editor explains the unconventional pick for the 2025 Lie of the Year
Each year, Poynter’s PolitiFact selects its Lie of the Year.
While the choice is clear many years, the PolitiFact team still goes through a painstaking process before choosing the biggest lie.
They have meetings, do thorough research and reporting, talk to various experts and sources, have more meetings and poll readers. PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders tells me the first meeting about this year’s Lie of the Year actually happened in October.
“We should really talk about it as early as possible, so that we have plenty of time to work on this story,” Sanders told me.
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.
Related Knowledge Center: 2025: looking back
The annual retrospectives from news organizations.