I don't think the comparison of balancing viewpoints in a classroom is really comparable to the fair and balanced media argument. In a classroom, you're dealing

I don't think the comparison of balancing viewpoints in a classroom is really comparable to the fair and balanced media argument. In a classroom, you're dealing with a classroom full of a limited number of people who need to be able to state and defend their ideas. It's unlikely that someone in such a classroom will bring up whether the moon is made of the body of Vince Foster, but if they do, students should be able to make a reasonable decision on how to respond (in that case, it requires little response beyond polite derision). Dismissing something as a red herring without even bringing it up in a classroom avoids a key responsibility of an educator: students need to be able to recognize red herrings and respond to them as such. Red herrings occur in the real world. The role of the educator is not to dictate accurate information, it's to teach people how to critically process information. The news, on the other hand, does have the responsibility to dictate accurate information. As such, the only opinions that matter are the opinions of experts, and those should be subservient to data. "Fair and balanced" doesn't often matter because if there are really two sides to the issue, the "information" isn't accurate enough to be presenting to an inexpert public anyway. Debates should happen between experts based on the data, without politicization, and news should report the results.