‘Balanced Reporting’ is Failing the Public
It’s a messy landscape out there with fake news, fast news and extreme partisan reporting. In mitigating these attacks on journalism, did we make neutrality more valuable than the truth?
There’s an established trust in journalists to present a ‘fair and objective’ version of news and events. Our minds equate balance with ‘truth’ and the thinking goes that there are two sides to every story, and by presenting both, the truth can be found somewhere in between.
In a ‘Post-truth’ era, established media are clinging to balance, or objectivity, in journalism as a way to mitigate the proliferation of emotional appeals and outright lies spawned by partisan media and public figures intent on joining the fray via social media. But even with the public’s best interest at heart, journalists often do more harm than good by giving equal balance to unequal evidence in an attempt to remain impartial and objective.
When the evidence is clear cut, presenting contrasting evidence as being of equal importance to maintain ‘balance’ is presenting a lie. This lie is failing the public in a time when they need fearless journalists to interrogate evidence with transparency and honesty and to communicate this to the public so they can make the best decisions possible.
Where did objectivity come from?
Objectivity and legitimate balance lies at the heart of good journalism. Avoiding bias is something that good journalists and outlets pride themselves on, and mark as a strong point of difference between themselves and tabloid journalists.
The term itself gained traction in journalism around the 1920’s. It came from the recognition that journalists are full of conscious and unconscious bias. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — so that personal biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.
The method itself was objective, not the journalist.
Then, in 2016, ‘Post-truth’ was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. Defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, the rise of post-truth saw respected media scramble to reiterate their objectivity to set themselves apart.
Unfortunately, for many media outlets, this often meant an attempt to take the journalist — and all their respective bias — out of the picture, making them a mere conduit of information, channelling both sides into a single article or broadcast with the use of a basic formula of, ‘one from column A and one from column B equals truth’ so as to not leave themselves open to criticisms of post-truth reporting. Instead of the method being objective, the journalist becomes so.
The problem with this is that column A and column B — and so on down to Z and beyond — were not created equal. This kind of reporting creates what is called, ‘false balance’ — a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being balanced when the evidence suggests otherwise.
Doggedly reporting ‘both sides’ with little interrogation of the legitimacy or evidence behind each argument can lead to misleading coverage and an outright misrepresentation of facts.
How does false balance harm the public?
If a media outlet has been scrupulous enough in it’s past to maintain the trust of the public, engaging in false balance uses this trust to mislead the public, whether it’s intentional or not.
The obvious example to examine the detrimental effects of false balance in reporting is in science reporting, most notable, coverage of climate change.
If you were to read an article on the legitimacy of climate change, in many cases the journalist is balancing the scientific evidence and the denial of the evidence in equal measure. This presents the issue as if it’s a 50–50 split and either side could be right. But when scientific consensus regarding climate change is around 97%, and deniers make up only 3% of the community, this kind of ‘balanced’ reporting is creating an outrageously skewed picture of the debate as it stands.
Good scientific journalists are trained to interrogate evidence and present their findings to the public with transparency about why they presented the facts that they did and why other evidence wasn’t included at all. Engaging in false balance undermines this engagement with evidence. It risks giving debunked or dangerous fringe views legitimacy and publicity. This is clear when you read most reports on nutrition and health that give false prominence to research findings in order to spur on the rocketing rise of the health food and weight loss industries.
But it’s not just within scientific reporting that false balance occurs. It happens in smaller and less obvious ways across the spectrum of news.
False balance is often born of sensationalism. To make the article more commercially viable, facts are skewed and opinions are crafted to be overtly contentious in an effort to appeal to people’s emotions. But not everyone who engages in false balance is of bad intent. Sometimes journalists are afraid of being perceived of bias in their articles, so they’ll give more credence to ideas that aren’t proportionally accurate. A paragraph might be lengthened here or there, or an extra quote from side B thrown in, in an attempt to make you think that the journalist isn’t letting their personal bias get in the way of a good controversy, when in reality the point is quite clean-cut.
While it’s easy to deride established media, it’s important to note that independent media can sometimes get away with false balance more easily. Traditional forms of journalism have fact checkers and, regardless of levels of sensationalism, are more accountable than a lot of news in the online space where transparency of reporting and editing is lacking.
So is balanced reporting really such a serious threat to journalism? In a word: yes. Whether it’s due to fear of bias, sensationalising the news or downright agenda pushing, we will always find our waters muddied.
How will InPress combat false balance?
Do we think that our journalists come without bias and are completely free of the tendency to unfairly ‘balance’ an article in an attempt at full, unbiased objectivity?
Of course not. We expect our journalists to be engaged with the world and the stories they are reporting on. They are expected to evaluate credibility and be transparent in their judgements — and their biases — in order to get as close to the truth as possible.
With a grassroots model of reporting and journalism (the journalists decide what to investigate and write about), journalists won’t have to stick to deeply dug social and political lines that are dared not crossed for fear of losing readership ratings. The InPress agenda is your agenda — good news, presented with transparency.
Rigorous fact checking forces the journalist to fully back up any claims made and their own biases and affiliations will be fully disclosed so you know the story behind the person who wrote this story.
Encouraging readers and journalists to engage in open, honest discussions about the legitimacy of evidence, the credibility of a source and the story behind an agenda, instead of just working to a formula that is dumbing down news, puts InPress in a unique position. We’re hoping it will create a platform that can help kill the echo chamber that has engulfed personalised media thanks to social media and socially divided mastheads. We’re also hoping it will encourage journalists and readers to interrogate the underlying forces that makes news happen in the first place, rather than just dwelling on the immediate outcomes.
But most of all, we hope that with a diversity of voices and their plethora of conscious and unconscious biases, readers will be able to experience the world through a different set of eyes. You will learn why people think what they think, have access to all the evidence that led them to their conclusions, and in the end, decide for yourself.
Interested in learning more about InPress? Jump over to www.inpress.media for all the info you’ll need, plus a free $1 reading material for giving us a chance!
