Confronting False Balance in a Polarized News Environment: Why it Matters
As media outlets, the goal remains to produce factual, unbiased news. The conventional wisdom behind this usually involves promoting balance — that is, we ought to include sources from both sides of the debate in order to best represent the facts of the debate, and be careful not to privilege one side over the other. Balance will always be important, but truly achieving it is harder than it ever was before.
For one thing, your suspicion that American politics have grown more divisive isn’t simply anecdote — just look at these Pew Research graphs and see how people have shifted from mostly mixed political views in 1994 to sharp divides between far left and far right in 2017. Studies have shown those with radical views are less likely to consider others’ perspectives, not to mention we’ve seen all sorts of studies on confirmation bias, such as Lord et al., whose reading response experiment showed that, when shown a factually inaccurate source that confirms their pre-existing ideas and an accurate source that challenges them, people were more likely to accept the confirming source, even if it was wrong.
We might be more likely to fall prey to misinformation now more than ever, and certainly more likely to be accused of being fake news even if we’ve reported the facts. As editors, this makes our jobs difficult in a whole new way. In a world of anti-vaxxers and climate doubters, not to mention the recent Black Lives Matter debate, we need to redefine balance out of simply including quotes from both sides and into weighing each perspective against empirical evidence, since not all arguments are created equal.
Fortunately, my perspective is by no means original. The AP Stylebook advocates against “false balance,” which it defines as “giving platform to unqualified claims or source in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.” Scripps’ very concise journalism ethics guide “makes every effort to be fair to all sides regardless of deadline,” but “are careful not to assume all sides should be weighted equally” since this would unfairly give certain perspectives false equivalency. The Society of Professional Journalists, meanwhile, write in their code of ethics that journalists should “support the open and civil exchange of views, even if they find them repugnant,” adding also in their provisions that it’s important to be careful that including the other side “does not create imbalance.”
As it turns out, mainstream style guides and journalistic organizations’ perspectives on balance have evolved to pay closer attention to ensure we lend space in our articles for all sides that are capable of providing factual information.
We see the question of balance appear in a number of conservatives talking points, such as opposition to vaccination, skepticism toward climate change, and resistance to Black Lives Matter Protests. I really don’t mean to take aim specifically at conservatives — after all, not all Republicans have the same ideas on these issues — but it turns out radical conservatives do bring forward some of the most egregious cases.
To say there’s a scientific consensus on climate change is an understatement — a 2016 study sampled 2412 climate studies tracking climate data to find that only 72 pointed to skeptical conclusions. Those skeptical of the MMR vaccine can only point to Wakefield (1998), which had a sample size of 12 patients and linked MMR to autism, to support their arguments, while more than 20 subsequent data could not reproduce the same results, with one cohort study sampling more than 500,000 children across four years.
Most recently, despite Fox News’ choice to near exclusively cover BLM protests without reference to police brutality, the ACLED tracked more than 10,600 demonstrations between May 24 and August 22, finding that over 95% of protests were peaceful, challenging a frequent assumption that BLM protests are characteristically violent.
Let’s be clear, then. As editors and writers, we have no obligation whatsoever to dedicate grafs to factually inaccurate perspectives without disclaimers. Doing so would be neither balanced, factual, nor ethical. If our copy leaves readers under the impression that “some BLM protesters are peaceful, and others are violent” without making it clear what the ratio actually is, we’re fueling unconscious biases, and we’ve failed our jobs as factual reporters and editors. As Scripps says, “If the balance of evidence in an issue weighs more toward one side, we say so.”
This isn’t to overlook when misinformation actually does occur due to shoddy editing. After all, no one is immune to bias, not even editors. And certainly there are times when this bias leads us to omit key factual details which we’ve written off as “false balance.” Editing is a cognitively recursive act where we must always consider and reconsider, check our assumptions against the data and then ask our colleagues for good measure. Just as we ask readers to consider other perspectives along with the empirical facts, so too must we hold ourselves to the highest standards of metacognitive, sensitive editing.
Unfortunately, doing our job will inevitably place us under the ire of those with whom we might disagree. Those absolutely convinced that most or all BLM protestors are violent will accuse us of committing journalistic dishonesty since we should have paid fair attention “to all sides.” After all, Lord et al. show us that people believe what they want to, even if it’s wrong. This can quickly rise from a few dissenting voices to an angry mob that stands to damage a publication’s reputation, fairly or unfairly.
But the alternative is worse — if we include inaccurate opposing sources as though they had equal weight simply to appease everyone, we run the risk of violating our most basic tenet — informing the public. Fringe media pundits and outlets benefit from this when the perspectives appear equivalent, and this can quickly become dangerous if we’ve convinced people to stop getting flu shots simply to keep the mob away and the lights on. The irony, then, is that in our current political environment, sticking to the facts will get us branded as fake news. But we must stay factual all the same.
If there’s a silver lining to these new challenges we face, it’s that our dissenters tend to be fringe alt-right people whose views see little to no acceptance (but increasingly, sadly) in wider society. If they’d like, they’re free to go ahead and respond, making themselves look bad along the way.
