The Liberal Media & The Myth Of Balance

[Prophet 451]

Objectivity in journalism is more difficult than it sounds. Partly, that's because of the insatiable demands placed on the profession for favourable coverage but mainly, it's simply because journalists are as prone to being influenced by the dominant social paradigm as the rest of us are. For years, the media (and herein, I mean mainly the print media) solved this by keeping to "just the facts, ma'am". Opinion, where it did appear, was clearly labelled as such and where opinion mongers might say something outrageous and people might complain, they were just opinion mongers who wrote a column, they didn't affect the way the news was actually covered.

In response to the constant shrill cries of "liberal bias" (rarely true as they were), the news media began to shift to the right, slowly at first and then in leaps and bounds. The problem is that certain right-wing views (such as creationism or voodoo economics) simply cannot be presented as facts without outright lying. Strange thing about journalists, while they may obsfucate, shroud, equivocate and confuse, they tend to consider outright lying beneath them. And yet, one cannot simply report the facts and hope they support conservative causes since this is rarely the case (Stephen Colbert's greatest line and the one he will go down in history for: "Reality has a liberal bias"). So, what to do? If you report just the facts, the conservatives are going to jump on you because the facts usually don't support them but if you report things in a way which does support them, you're probably lying. What to do?

Journalists are at least as prone as the rest of us to being influenced by the dominant social paradigm. As people who live and work in our society, it would be impossible not to be and somewhere in the last thirty years, our society has become infected with a virulent disease called "nothing is true". Some things of course, such as religion, simply can't be evaluated as straightfowardly true or false and that's fine. Such things are usually beyond the scope of news journalism anyway. However, as some point, there arose this disease which declared that the "maybe-maybe not" system should be applied to everything. Good example is evolution. Now, some people will believe that evolution was triggered by a deity and that's fine (that's my own position, actually). Some others will quibble with the exact details or the exact timeframe and that's fine, that's just the nature of scientific research but research has proved that evolution, if incomplete, is the most likely explanation for our existance and has proven, beyond any doubt, that creationism, in the form usually presented, is flat-out wrong. And yet. And yet, when our media touches upon evolution, the two sides are presented as equals, as if there were as much evidence on one side as on another.

And so, we come to the myth of "balance". "Balance" in it's simplest form can be understood as saying that if we give you a historian talking about Nazi atrocities, we give you another saying Hitler was a prince. Another example is Hugo Chavez. Now, I quite like Chavez. He's made a few mistakes, he's slightly crass and, like any politician, he should be watched like a hawk for abuse of power but, on the whole, I think he's done more good than harm. Of course, others may disagree with his policies and positions and that's fine, that's how politics works. But when the news media refers to Chavez as a "dictator", one has to wonder why the myth of balance insists that we slander a man despite there being no truth to the accusation. Chavez, like him or hate him, was elected twice in elections which, for openess and transparency, put our own to shame. The accusation is bullshit but it's reported as fact because the myth of balance says that we must not take a side. Or consider Al Gore's 2000 run at the presidency. The lies told about Gore were legion but to pick one, let's go with the myth that he invented the internet. There are two points here that, in the days of "just the facts" would have been brought up swiftly and killed the story. The first is that Gore never actually said that and the second is that, even if he had, it wouldn't have been that far from the truth (Gore was one of the first politicians to see the potential of the web and pump funding into it's development). Or consider John Kerry. The Swiftboat smear was a complete lie. There was not a single word of truth to it but because the accusation was reported as "he said-she said", millions of people believe it even now.

I could go on for a while but you get the point. The myth of balance insists that an unfounded accusation is the same as a proven fact, that there is no such thing as truth. There are still a few holdouts, of course. The Wall Street Journal's actual reporting (as distinguished from the op-ed page) is usually fact-based although how long they can hold out against Murdoch remains to be seen. The London Times managed to guard their reputation for scrupulous objectivity for several years after Murdoch aquired them so the WSJ may have a few years left yet. The BBC has only started to suffer recently. Gradually, the myth of balance infects all and the myth says that we must treat true and false equally, we must never pick a side because to do so is biased.

I don't care about bias. I don't want "balance" from my news, I want facts.