Brian from Michigan

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It all started in 2012. I was the editor of the fact-checking site PolitiFact and a guest on Washington Journal, C-SPAN’s wonderfully wonky morning show. It features politicians, journalists, and policy experts taking questions from an amiable host and an unpredictable group of callers. Someone identified as Brian from Michigan called in to ask if it was true that Republicans lied more than Democrats. I said that we didn’t keep score. 

That was a lie. PolitiFact did keep score by politician. You could navigate to their page and see a tally of how their claims had been rated. The pattern was easy to see: Republicans earned far more False and Pants on Fire! ratings than Democrats. 

I lied to Brian because I was determined to show I was an impartial journalist and did not want to be accused of bias. That’s a common fear of fact-checkers. Although we have thick skin because of the nature of the work, we want to show that we don’t play favorites. I didn’t use that lie very often—usually I ducked questions by comparing my work to that of a baseball umpire—but this time, because Brian asked for the partisan score, I decided to lie.

I recounted this episode in Beyond the Big Lie, a book I published last fall, to illustrate how journalists have avoided questions about the partisan differences in lying. I hoped Brian would hear about the book and see he was right that Republicans lie more. During my book tour, I went back on Washington Journal and mentioned the incident in hopes he would call in. I got questions from John from Ohio and Joyce from South Carolina, but not Brian. So I set out to find him, give him a copy of the book, and apologize for my lie. 

The odds were daunting. Washington Journal does not keep track of callers, beyond their first name and location—and according to MyNameStats.com, Michigan has more than fifty-three thousand Brians. I enlisted help from two Duke students, Abby DiSalvo and Alexa Troob. We started by searching old Washington Journal programs, figuring that Brian was probably a repeat caller. Abby quickly discovered that our hunch was right: in the Television Archive, she found a dozen calls that were clearly him. It helped that his voice was distinctive—gravelly and passionate. He sounded like he was in his fifties or sixties. 

In an era in which discourse in the media has gotten shorter and meaner, C-SPAN is a throwback to an analog age, with 24-7 political speeches and policy discussions. The network, launched as a public service by cable providers in 1979, provides unfiltered talk from Congress, the president, executive-branch officials, policy experts, and the occasional journalist like me.

Washington Journal is a simple show anchored by smart but serious hosts who, in an age of high-tech graphics, still use ballpoint pens to point to newspapers. The anchors begin by asking guests a few questions and then go to phone lines designated for Republicans, Democrats, and independents. When callers occasionally say wacky things, the hosts remain poker-faced. (The show Last Week Tonight once highlighted the absurdist calls of Walter from Indiana, who offered thoughts on mortality, writing letters in cursive, and his fondness for Spam sandwiches.) 

Michele Remillard, the executive producer of Washington Journal, directs the hosts to be human but avoid revealing their point of view. She tells them, “I don’t want you to be a department store mannequin. This is still a conversation you’re having with a viewer.” Callers are given a fair amount of leeway, but the show has a seven-second delay in case someone utters an especially offensive word—they trigger the delay whenever someone uses any of the seven words that George Carlin identified in his classic comedy routine, according to Remillard.

The callers do not give their full names, but they do reveal clues about themselves—their beliefs, passions, reading habits, and their manners. Brian usually began his remarks with a polite greeting—“Good morning, Steve, good morning, America”—and once ended with “God bless America.” He was well-read. In my segment, he cited The Nation magazine. In other calls, he rattled off details of trade agreements, job growth, and the administrative costs of Medicare. He quoted Benjamin Franklin and an obscure eighteenth-century British politician. He loved Barack Obama and believed Republicans had been obstructionists to his policies. Brian said he voted for Obama twice and that he’d “walk on nails to vote for him again.”

His last call was January 7, 2016, about a House vote to repeal Obamacare. He groused that Republicans “do not like social health programs. They figure it’s survival of the fittest. It’s social Darwinism! It’s crap is what it is!” As far as we could tell, C-SPAN never heard from Brian again.

My search for Brian was partly to solve a simple mystery: Who was this guy? When I was promoting the book, I often began by reading the C-SPAN scene. But I realized that I knew nothing about him other than his name, his home state, and that he read The Nation. I tried to picture what he would be like. It sounded like he generally fit the profile that I imagined for C-SPAN viewers: older and well-read. I wanted to know more. What kind of person takes the time to read up on PolitiFact fact-checks and to call into Washington Journal?

Also, I needed to say I was sorry. As a fact-checker who had exposed many politicians for lying, I felt I should apologize to Brian for my own lie. Fact-checkers followed a principle that people should be accountable for what they say. I should live up to that, too.

My desire to contact him also reflected an evolution in how I discussed the state of our politics. Like other political journalists, I had long believed that being impartial was critical to fair coverage of our discourse. But I had realized that often resulted in false balance that hid the magnitude of the Republicans’ lying. After I left PolitiFact and joined the faculty at Duke University, I decided that all journalists need to be more frank in discussing the disparity in lying. And looking back, it was clear that in 2012, Brian was right. I needed to find him and tell him.

In the internet age, there’s an expectation that you can find anyone quickly and easily because they’ve left a giant digital footprint of public records and social media. Brian proved much tougher to track down. Abby had gone back to search Washington Journal episodes prior to my 2012 appearance and eventually identified twenty-one calls from Brian, including one in 2010 with an important new clue: Brian said he was sixty-two years old.

Many of Brian’s calls mentioned that he was from Mancelona, a town of about fourteen hundred people in the northern part of the state’s lower peninsula, so Abby and Alexa focused their search around that area. They searched transcripts from the meetings of the Mancelona Village Council on a hunch he might have been one of those gadflies who piped up during public comment periods (nope). They looked for letters to the editor in the local papers (none in the years we could search). They checked campaign contribution lists (Michigan voter rolls don’t indicate party, but contributions can offer a clue). They even checked lists and photos of Mancelona deer hunters (there were many Brians, but all seemed to be the wrong age).

Eventually, we zeroed in on one person: Brian Wood. He was close to the right age, and our database searches suggested he was probably a Democrat. And, unfortunately, he died in 2019. A short obituary from Mortensen Funeral Homes said that he “had a very happy personality and loved spending time with his family. His greatest love was his grandchildren. He enjoyed gardening and cooking.”

In November, I wrote to Brian Wood’s two surviving children, Alisa and Robert, to see if he was our guy. When I didn’t hear back, I reached out to Democratic officials in Antrim County, where Mancelona is located, and they connected me with a volunteer named Allen Wolf. He had access to the party database—and loved a good mystery. A few hours later, he called back: Brian Wood was almost definitely our guy.

I shipped Wolf a copy of my book and a letter to give to Alisa. “As you’ll see in the opening of the book, Brian is something of a hero,” I wrote. “Assuming that he is your father, I’d like to apologize for this lie to you and any other surviving relatives of Brian.”

A few weeks later, I heard from Alisa. “I was very touched to discover that his life’s passions of seeking honesty, integrity and fairness are still making an impact on the world we live in,” she wrote in an email. When we spoke on the phone, she reminisced about her father, whom she described as a fair-skinned, freckled man with red hair. She said he was not only a frequent caller to Washington Journal but a prolific letter writer to the local newspaper as well as to lawmakers and presidents. He occasionally got replies, including one from President George H.W. Bush that he framed on his wall. After an injury on the job at an automotive-parts plant left him on long-term disability, he passed the time by watching a lot of TV—CNN, MSNBC, and, of course, C-SPAN. “I’m keeping an eye on the motherfuckers,” he would say. 

Alisa also accepted my apology for lying to Brian. “He would be tickled he got this much attention out of it,” she said. “He would be beaming.”

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