Gaber, I., & Fisher, C. (2022). “strategic lying”: The case of Brexit and the 2019 U.k. election. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 27, 460–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161221994100
Summary
This conceptual paper introduces and theorizes “strategic lying” — a deliberate campaigning tactic in which politicians knowingly disseminate false claims not primarily to persuade on the facts but to set, prime, and frame the news agenda. Gaber and Fisher argue that strategic lying is not a radical break from established political “spin” but an evolution of it, intensified by professionalized political communication and social media. Drawing on the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 U.K. general election (with Trump’s U.S. campaigns as supporting reference), the authors contend that in a post-truth environment, politicians caught lying are increasingly not punished at the ballot box — a development that threatens the liberal-democratic norm of an informed electorate.
Key Contributions
- Introduces and defines the original concept of strategic lying, with three distinguishing criteria: repetition of blatant untruths despite knowing they are false, keeping the campaign focus on favorable agenda items, and being attention-grabbing enough to guarantee amplification.
- Situates strategic lying within the historical evolution of spin, distinguishing it from adjacent concepts such as “wicked content,” the “dead cat strategy,” and “bullshitting,” and arguing against framing post-truth as a rupture.
- Applies intermedia agenda-setting, priming, and framing theory to explain how lies operate strategically across hybrid digital and traditional media.
- Provides documented U.K. case evidence and calls for further research on the prevalence and electoral effects of strategic lying.
Methods
A conceptual/theoretical paper combining agenda-setting and behavioral-science literature with two qualitative case studies: the 2016 Leave campaign and the 2019 Conservative Party campaign, with Trump’s campaigns as comparative illustration. Evidence is drawn from documentary sources (Dominic Cummings’ blog, party campaign materials), fact-checking organizations (First Draft, Full Fact), news reporting, and media monitoring data (e.g., Loughborough University coverage analysis).
Findings
- The Leave campaign’s £350m/week NHS claim and the “Turkey joining the EU” claim primed sovereignty and immigration concerns; Cummings admitted the figure was designed to “provoke people into argument” rather than inform.
- In 2019, most campaign lies came from the Conservatives — First Draft found 88% of Conservative Facebook ads contained “suspect information” versus 6.7% of Labour’s.
- Documented examples include a doctored Keir Starmer video, an inflated £1.2 trillion Labour spending claim (vs. the IFS’s £98 billion), false hospital and nurse figures, and two deceptive websites, including the rebranded “Factcheck UK” account that prompted a warning from Twitter.
- The strategic lie works in two stages: the attention-grabbing lie and the rebuttal, which inadvertently amplifies and legitimizes the lie; corrections fade while the lie persists, reinforced by confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
- Media monitoring showed Brexit was the most-covered topic in the 2019 campaign, suggesting the lies succeeded in holding the agenda on Conservative-favorable ground (correlation, not causation, is noted).
Connections
This paper’s argument that fact-checking and rebuttals can backfire by amplifying and legitimizing false claims speaks directly to the empirical literature on correction efficacy and misinformation persistence — see Rossini2026-jn and Cazzamatta2026-lo on fact-checking, and Hameleers2026-mc on disinformation exposure. Its focus on elite-driven strategic falsehood and the “post-truth” erosion of accountability connects to work on populist and political misinformation such as Knupfer2025-vt and Kalsnes2025-zb. The concern with reduced gatekeeping and network-based dissemination via social media relates to research on digital campaign communication like Larsson2026-ro.
Podcast
A research-radio episode discusses this paper: 🎧 MP3 · Spotify