Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with the programme that

sidles up to statistics and asks them where they're from, while observing social distancing rules

of course, and I'm Tim Harford. This week things are really hotting up in the race to become

the president of the United States. On one side you have the former Vice President, Democrat

Joe Biden, and on the other the Republican incumbent, President Donald Trump.

This year the election has been overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, but it's also been

marred by claims such as these. Take a look at West Virginia mailman selling the ballots,

they're being sold, they're being dumped in rivers. What he did, even before COVID,

manufacturing went in the hole. Manufacturing went in the hole.

Politicians lying, it's not entirely an alien concept, but it really seems to be catching on.

Fortunately there are people out there tracking politicians in accuracies, fibs and downright

lies. One such person is Glenn Kessler, Editor-in-Chief of the Fact Checker feature at the Washington

Post. Glenn's team has been fact checking misleading statements in US politics in election campaigns

since 2007 and continually since 2011. I spoke to him on Wednesday, the 21st of October,

and we began with a question, how do you measure the scale of a lie?

There's a children's story named Pinocchio, whose nose would grow depending how big a lie he told.

We got no strings to hold me down to make me proud.

We do it like basically Pinocchio heads. It was deemed that we had growing nose and might

maybe seem a little too phallic. The worst rating, a total wopper, is something that earns

four Pinocchios. And then three Pinocchios is something that is mostly false. Two Pinocchios is,

you know, there's some measure of truth to it. One Pinocchio is slightly exaggerated.

Glenn told us that this is essentially just a way to signpost the magnitude of the lie.

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