Balance and the Media, Redux posted by Ben

If you read anything that I link to this week, make it David Kneiwert's fantastic essay on the question of media bias and the quest for so-called balance.

Following up yesterday's post concerning Scientific American's scathing editorial about why they should not be expected to promote obvious falsehoods in the name of balance, as if opinions could somehow be weighted independently of fact, Kneiwert takes on the broader issue of media bias and balance as seen through the filter of the Schiavo coverage.

Now, there is such a thing as real balance. Real balance is a genuine striving for truth: a willingness to both recognize and honestly explore the multiplicity of viewpoints as well as facts that are part of the naturally complex nature of truth. It is complicated and hard work. Of course, real, hard truth is elusive and rare; but the striving is what brings us closer to it.

However, a genuine balance does not countenance obvious falsehoods where it encounters them. It does not treat misinformation as a legitimate "counter" to reasonably established facts, as though a falsehood were just another opinion. It does not put lies on an even footing with facts.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what we have gotten, in increasing doses, as standard practice from the nation's press for the past decade. [snip]

The key piece of illogic is one that has especially lodged itself in the media in recent years: The notion that a demonstrably true fact can be properly countered by a demonstrably false one -- and that the two, placed side by side, represent a kind of "balance" in the national discourse. This is the Foxcist model of Newspeak, in which "fair and balanced" comes to mean its exact opposite. [snip]

What "balance" has become, in essence, is a fig leaf for broadcasting falsehoods on behalf of right-wing propaganda efforts. In the process, it has become a major means for transmitting extremist beliefs into the mainstream. The Schiavo matter is only the most prominent recent example of this.

There is much, much more at the link. It's long, but is worth passing on especially for the lucidity with which Kneiwert makes and supports his key point, that the media has lost its ability to identify and call out falsehoods, lies, and distortions of the truth.