The ‘Liar’s Dividend’ is dangerous for journalists. Here’s how to fight it.

The Liar’s Dividend suggests that in addition to fueling the flames of falsehoods, the debunking efforts actually legitimize the debate over the veracity. This creates smoke and fans suspicions among at least some in the audience that there might well be something true about the claim. That’s the “dividend” paid to the perpetrator of the lie.

To dig back into ancient history for an example, in 2010 after robust reporting by almost every American news outlet that Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth was certain, the intense debunking could not erase the doubt in the minds of a significant segment of the American public. At that point, 25% of Americans still thought it was likely or probable that Obama was born overseas. Well under half, only 42% of poll respondents, believed the facts as they had been conclusively demonstrated: that Obama was certainly born in the U.S. And 29% said they believed the president was probably born in the US. Certainly, political predisposition contributes to the existence of the Liar’s Dividend; in a polarized society, it can’t be minimized.

This is problematic for reporters and fact-checkers, and it buoys purveyors of misinformation. As NPR’s Media Correspondent David Folkenflik suggested at the symposium, “The idea is there’s just enough chum in water, it distracts people, nobody knows which to believe and they move on.”

Arguably, we can trace the concept of the Liar’s Dividend to a strategy employed by big tobacco in the 1980s. Faced with mounting research that cigarettes cause cancer, the Big Tobacco Playbook was employed to plant doubt in the public’s mind as a means to dispute the emerging science.

That strategy took advantage of a tendency within the press to look for opposing sides to duel in any story, a flawed reporting technique that eventually came to be known as false equivalency. —Poynter