Lit Hub: “…Today, there’s still a range of opinions about using the word. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker, uses it broadly to refer to Trump’s “election lies” or “the big lie.” FactCheck.org doesn’t use it. But maybe we’ve been too cautious. A 2018 study by researcher Paul Mena found a disconnect between journalists (68 percent of whom opposed the use of the word) and the public (20 percent opposed). I was a holdout for many years. Even after the Times broke the barrier, I stuck to using “falsehood” and “false claim.” But I reconsidered as I realized the magnitude of the problem, and concluded that, in most cases, the politician knows they are lying. Also, I realized that in the real world people don’t draw such stark lines about the definitions. They know politicians lie. They may not like it, but they are very aware of it. In this book, I’m using “lie” and “lying” broadly to refer to both the overall phenomenon and individual falsehoods when I believe the person making the false charge knew it was false. Purists might quibble with that. But I believe that retreating to the semantic safety of the past cloaks the serious problem of lying that is threatening our political discourse (and that is the reason I wrote this book). Another clarification about my terminology: A broken promise is not a lie. Although they are sometimes referred to that way, a broken promise is a separate political act and deserves its own category. At PolitiFact, we created a feature called the Obameter to track President Obama’s promises, an unprecedented undertaking that initially followed 508 things he vowed to do during the campaign, everything from “Provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants” to “Fund proposals to help fish and game survive climate change.” The Obameter inspired promise tracking by fact-checkers in other nations and prompted us to create more than a dozen meters that have tracked the promises of mayors and governors around the United States. Together, these efforts contribute to a unique form of journalism that goes beyond fact-checking in holding politicians accountable…”