I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, December 22nd.

Nine days to go in 2021. Let's talk about the biggest pinocchioes of the year. What's a

pinocchio? Well, as the year

winds down, you may be seeing a whole bunch of those year-end lists and round-ups, you know,

best music, best books, best movies, worst trends, all that. But in this age of disinformation,

there was also some value in reflecting on some of the biggest, most pervasive lies we heard

over the last year, too. January 6th and stolen election lies, obviously, pandemic science lies,

obviously, but also other things. So with us now is Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer

of the fact checker for the Washington Post.

His year-end round-up is a list of the biggest Pinocchioes of the year. They grade the statements

of public officials on a scale of Pinocchio's from one to five. Hi, Glenn, thanks for doing

this with us. Early Happy New Year. Welcome to WNYC today. Yeah, happy to do

with you, be with you. I should fact check you. We grade from one to four. Oh, one to four.

Okay. For some reason, that four looks so big to my eye. It expands to five. Right. So the Washington Post grade statements of public officials on a scale

of Pinocchio's from one to four. So there it is. Correction. And remind everyone in general,

first, about how you award Pinocchio's throughout the year? Well, we have a column.

We aim for at least five times a week.

And we, you know, we focus particularly on statements made by politicians or political figures or advocacy groups.

And then we judge the accuracy of those statements on a scale, as I said, from one to four.

There's also another thing called the Chippetto checkmark that's when it's absolutely completely

true.

There we tend to reserve that for statements that are unexpectedly true. Something did you hear that you think, oh, that has to be

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