“Fair” and “Balanced” Are Not the Same — and Sometimes It’s Not Even Close

The executives at Fox News didn’t create the false equivalency between “fair” and “balanced,” but they certainly turned it into a national catchphrase before abandoning their network tag line in 2016. The phrase itself invokes an intuitive human belief that fairness means treating all sides of a dispute equally. This is flat-out wrong, but it can sometimes lead to better reporting by encouraging journalists to compensate for their own biases — which is indeed an important element of critical thinking. Just as often, though, it leads to the nonsensical claim that news outlets are being unfair if they refuse to treat all fact claims as equally legitimate.

Some definitions are in order. Fair reporting on political arguments means reporting that evaluates all claims by the same criteria. “Balanced” reporting, on the other hand, means (or at least can be made to mean) reporting that treats everybody’s claims as equally true. We should have no difficulty imagining scenarios in which a fair evaluation of a set of political claims produces imbalanced results. All we have to do is think about a situation in which one politician or elected official lies about stuff more than the rest.

Fortunately, though, we don’t have to imagine anything. All we have to do is look at Senator Mike Lee’s recent comments…