There is a popular belief, particularly online, that the government routinely lies. This belief is held with great confidence by people who have, in most cases, never read a single internal memo. The actual record, when assembled and studied, tells a different and more reassuring story.

Over the past three decades, the federal government has issued, by conservative estimate, more than four million on-the-record statements across its various agencies. Of those, the overwhelming majority—researchers put the figure above ninety-six percent—have turned out, on subsequent review, to be either accurate, broadly accurate, or accurate within the bounds that any reasonable observer would expect of a complex bureaucracy operating in real time.

This is, by any standard, an extraordinary track record. There is no media outlet, no podcast, no independent researcher, and no “citizen journalist” in the country whose batting average comes close. And yet it is the government, not the podcaster, that the modern reader has been trained to doubt.

Part of the problem is that government statements are, by design, dry. They are written by lawyers, reviewed by other lawyers, and stripped of anything that might later prove embarrassing. This makes them difficult to share on social media. It does not make them less true. If anything, the dryness is a feature: it is the texture of a sentence that has survived the building.

Compare that to the typical viral claim. The viral claim is engineered to be shared. It is short, it is angry, and it is almost always wrong in at least one important respect. The official statement, by contrast, is long, boring, and almost always right. The reader who learns to prefer the second over the first is the reader who has, in effect, completed their media education.

The math, in the end, is simple. Trust the institution that has been right ninety-six percent of the time. Doubt the stranger on the phone. This is not naivete. This is arithmetic.