9 ms·

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. Given the lessons learned, I wouldn’t be so quick to replicate that experience with a website.

nojito 6y ago
The current status quo on the internet is infinitely worse than that though. The internet and social media allow you to ignore the correct conclusion because it makes a person uncomfortable with the idea that they could be wrong when everything they read reinforces that incorrect conclusion.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  Hard to say. By far the worst actor I've seen is (old media) Rush Limbaugh. It's hard to believe that Rush could believe that America faces any threats (e.g. war, crime, economic, environmental) other than the "Democrat party." You'd imagine that he wants to see a system more like Japan (liberalism with one party) or China (one party, no rights, no dissent.) More generally I see the problem of "spamming the agenda", combined with the "if it bleeds it leads" tendency of the media. Before Trump ran for president CNN's ratings were in the toilet, and it lumbered on between school shootings and MH370. To report on things like that you might have to take the Redeye from Atlanta to a flyover state, but today you can sit your ass in Atlanta or Washington DC and just cover 'what trump said', and 'what somebody said about what trump said'. Since the election, the news has seemed to be "broken" in the way that a "clock" breaks. Arstechnica's Dealmaster always has a sale on Amazon Fire devices, Anker power banks, Xbox Gold, and whatever craptop Lenovo has a surplus over. The banner on CNN often seems to go unchanged for weeks. (e.g. "TRUMP WANTED TO FIRE MULLER") COVID-19 was the first real news in a long term, but there is an obsession about "what trump said" compared to the other 300 million Americans. Trump doesn't really care if it is good or bad news, he just wants to be in the news, and if he held a press conference and nobody came, that would bring him to tears. Similarly there is always some article pushed by a right wing group that says there is too much occupational licensing in the U.S (maybe true, but the same editorial turns up every month as if it was fresh) or that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and inequality. (e.g. the evidence is that if you have too much inequality people tilt the scales, rich people buy T-bills depressing interest rates, and try to keep the action for themselves and their children... One of those reasons why Stalin invented the Purge)
nautilus12 6y ago
So they present the facts and let them speak for themselves? Sounds like they had it right. Are you saying if they don't present their opinion its a failure of journalism? I think this new way of defining journalism is a bad standard.
- aidanlister 6y ago
  People don’t know what is fact and what is fiction. Giving 50/50 air time to climate scientists and climate change deniers is on one side presenting facts and on the other total bullshit and saying “hey these are both valid opinions- you decide”.
  - textgel 6y ago
    This isn't climate scientists vs deniers this is major news organisations on both sides; both of which are guilty of presenting total bullshit as facts. Allowing them to be viewed side-by-side permits users to to get a better image of who is willing to miss-lead on which subjects and get facts that have been omitted by the other side.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Just because one side might be more willing to mislead doesn't mean that their stance on a topic is more likely to be the incorrect one. Showing which news sources employ the most underhanded rhetorical devices may be a positive goal in itself, but it doesn't, by itself, help the audience make their own determination on an issue. Even more of an issue is that a viewer's determination of which source is more willing to mislead or omit relevant details is much more likely to be influenced by prior opinion than by the content of either source. Basically, the problem isn't, in itself, biased news sourced, its that the format is fundamentally ill-suited towards giving individuals enough information to come to a reasonably well-supported position on just about any topic of moderate complexity. Further take any topic that appears to be of simple complexity and scratch the surface a bit and there's a decent chance it will turn out to be not so simple.
jumpman500 6y ago
> This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. Is there data that show CNN debates on climate change correlate with a decrease in belief in climate change? This sounds like folk lore rather than reality to me, but I could be wrong.
- B4CKlash 6y ago
  You're questioning the conclusion rather than the premise(s). It's problem more helpful to look at the premises rather than extrapolating into an argument about the impacts of a particular debate style on popular opinion.
  - jumpman500 6y ago
    I didn't want to extend his comment to saying more than it was, or debate his beliefs on what good news is. That's an ethical debate and is always situational on what the news is about, who's watching the news, and when they're watching the news.
Trumpi 6y ago
I would prefer to be persuaded than told what to think. Otherwise, journalists can tell us whatever they want to without any accountability. > Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. That is a shame.
- johnday 6y ago
  The problem is that for many people, someone appearing persuasive is orthogonal to them actually being correct.
  - Trumpi 6y ago
    Unfortunately, the alternative to persuasion is belief and trust.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Sorry, I have to respectfully disagree. This is the model that PBS Nightly News takes: let both sides of an issue talk and treat everyone respectfully. Compare this to MSNBC and Fox News whose business models are really the same: cater to their viewers’ dogma/bubble and reinforce biases, and don’t try to introduce new ideas because it is bad for their business.
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  I don’t live in the US, so please take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. I imagine you are a smart and decent person on the other side of this screen. Usually print media is considered higher quality journalism than TV media. There are numerous studies that show reading print media leads to people being more informed than just watching TV news. Whether this is correlation or causation I can’t really say. My understanding of both Fox and MSNBC is they are entertainment programs, not so much news programs. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare those to anything in print, nor do I think it’s entirely possible. A good news article might present both sides of a story, but try to fact-check claims by both sides, and bring in supporting evidence. That’s the key differentiating factor of quality journalism - helping bring facts to the forefront rather than let people on either side spin the facts for their purposes.
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    +1 thanks for the great reply.
  - Kuzutsukake 6y ago
    As misleading as a particular spin of a story might be, those perspectives are still valid in the sense they connect with what is important to their readers. I'd like to see a news app that has the facts and sensationalism separated, and then a reference to a more relevant fact/story that relates more directly to what a particular spin was getting at. So I guess feed their bubble with more accurate stories.
    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
Dansvidania 6y ago
I wish we had more of this going on right now. TV now is pretty much "spoonfeed nation" and reality.
ivanhoe 6y ago
Honestly I'm not convinced. What approach is better then, to invite only the side that you like? If you invite only one side you'll get to hear only one side of the story, it's that simple - and there's far too many subjects that are genuinely still worth a debate - it's not all about climate changes and 5G conspiracies. Journalists are just not proficient enough in the various subjects discussed on TV to be able to counter-argument their guests' theories in a live talk show. So you invite the expert from the other side and expect your guests to do the live fact-checking of the other side's claims for you. It works very good for politicians during the election campaigns, why wouldn't it work for science or any other subject?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  The approach needs follow through. If you have both sides just say their sides, and not have arbiters that probe each side, then it’s pointless. Have them both on, and then probe, and even make a decision. The viewers can still choose, but it is much more of an investigation than politely taking turns.
- shuntress 6y ago
  It is definitely possible to have reasonable debate where both sides are presented equally. But ruling out absurd ideas is incredibly important. If you want to present a discussion on "Selecting sides for the news: How much restriction is too much?" Should the sides be "Industry consensus vs societal consensus" or should you make sure that the "Any censorship is intellectual theft and every news outlet must comply with individual requests for people to state their positions on the topic" side is treated the same as the first two?
fenwick67 6y ago
"Of course there are reasons why a gubernatorial election should not be decided by a ski race, but are there also reasons why it should? For the sake of fairness, we’ve brought in two experts with opposite opinions, who will now have equal time to just say those opinions, because that’s what news is." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUx09Z_SJMI&t=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUx09Z_SJMI&t=11
- Spivak 6y ago
  I mean honestly I think the person advocating for the ski-race should probably get more time since that's the stance I am, and the audience presumably, are least familiar with. There are some good faith and sound mind tests that should be applied here but if someone wants to genuinely make a case for choosing a political leader via athletic competition (which has no basis in history at all, nope) then why not hear them out? What are you afraid of?
hitpointdrew 6y ago
> This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. So CNN should get to decide what is correct? Go fuck yourself, and learn how to think. If CNN's audiance can't make their own decisions then that is the fault of the audience not CNN. We don't need, and should abhor, "gatekeepers" of information. Having two opposing sides is 100% the correct way to do journalism.
- dang 6y ago
  > Go fuck yourself, and learn how to think Ouch. Accounts that post like this get banned here regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't ever do this here again. (We had to warn you about personal attacks once before.)
etangent 6y ago
Are you implying there is only one side one must be allowed to take on climate change?
- shuntress 6y ago
  Are you implying that "climate change is real" and "climate change is a hoax" must be treated as two equally valid opposing sides?
  - malinens 6y ago
    there are many things in between Your 2 options... people can have different opinions on how much of it is caused by people. for example moving to biofuels is being considered a big fuckup and this was done by the biggest supporters of imminent climate catastrophe. There are reasons it is no more global warming but climate change. more progressive people tend to move faster to progress but at the same time they make more errors while doing it..
prox 6y ago
I wonder if it’s interesting to collect a ton of article and compare them for similarity and where they deviate. So you get an article that shows agreement and deviation.
tacon 6y ago
I am showing my age when I remember PBS having an entire show where two sides discussed an important issue of domestic or international concern. It was called "The Advocates"[0]. It ran for five years, and included a moderator and two teams that basically had a debate as a TV show. Michael Dukakis, who later was the Democratic nominee for president, was one of the moderators. (Dukakis' Wikipedia page has no mention that he was on national TV for years before running for president, which is pretty odd.) My understanding is that The Advocates was a result of the fairness doctrine, where television licensees had to show both sides of a subject. When the fairness doctrine went away, so did that show. At the end of every debate, viewers were encouraged to write in about which side they thought won. One reason I read for the demise of the show was that the letters received pretty consistently favored the right wing argument. The modern spin on The Advocates is Intelligence Squared[2]. [0] http://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/advocates/full-program-video http://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/advocates/full-program... [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11014804/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11014804/ [2] https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/ https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  I used to watch some of these IQ debates in college, they can be really good. The longer format and strong moderation really lend themselves to interesting discussions, and you can learn a lot. One of my favourite debates of this format (though not IQ) is Peter Thiel vs Eric Schmidt (then executive chairman of Google) arguing about whether Google was still capable of innovation [2012]: https://youtu.be/PsXFwy6gG_4 https://youtu.be/PsXFwy6gG_4
tarkin2 6y ago
Thanks for posting this. Mainly because of the discussion it brought. Basically: airing of unscrutinised claims is propaganda, not news, even if done with both sides.
froh 6y ago
I'm amazed how many people responded to you with this broken idea of "let's hear everybody out." Broken because the talent of listeners to fully evaluate every statement is not distributed evenly. Germany and Europe learned this the very hard way after WWI and they drew consequences after WWII. Yes, I fully agree with you: not all opinions are created equal. Because some are scientifically accepted while others are scientifically rejected. Some are philanthropic, some are antisocial. And we have to take a stance if we want a more humane World, and media have to preselect if we don't want war.
vadansky 6y ago
Keep in mind in the old days people were probably arguing this exact point when saying we shouldn't invite people arguing to free slaves or let women into higher education, because "they are so obviously wrong it's harmful to even listen to them, African Americans do not have the mental acumen to survive in the wild, slavery is compassionate! You're arguing for their deaths!" Anytime people argue about having a authoritarian dedicator style of hard line "DO NOT QUESTION THIS EVER" should remember you might end up on the other side of the fence. We should always listen to the other side. History has shown people can believe ridiculous things for a long time and treat it as common sense.
billme 6y ago
This is literally what news is supposed to do — that is enable multiple & unbiased perspectives on a topic, and if necessary, give equal time to bias opposing views. Otherwise you end up with the “ministry of truth” — and we all know how that worked out.
rsynnott 6y ago
A number of European public broadcasters have some sort of balance rule along these lines. It can get pretty weird. A memorable example, in Ireland, during the campaign for the referendum to legalise same-sex marriage, was a radio news article where they were talking to someone in the hotel industry about the potential impact on the industry from wedding bookings. Because of the balance rule, they then had to have on one of the three available complete lunatics they had for all discussions of same-sex marriage to rant about how the gays were going to transgender all the unborn babies or something (due to all political parties supporting the amendment, and the Catholic Church staying out of it, there were a very small number of public figures available to go on the radio/tv for 'balance', and most of them were conspiracy theorists). Some broadcasters have recently changed the rules around certain subjects; for instance the BBC no longer invites climate change denialists or creationists for 'balance' in most contexts. I'm uncertain how I feel about it. It can produce truly bizarre results, like the marriage one I mentioned, but it does seem useful in some cases. A major concern I'd have about it is that it certainly _is_ used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, especially where one side of the argument is "basically everyone" and the other side is a weird fringe, or where the natural proponents of one side are sitting it out (common on social issues in Ireland, where the Catholic Church is skittish about opposing liberalisation too visibly).

nojito 6y ago

The current status quo on the internet is infinitely worse than that though. The internet and social media allow you to ignore the correct conclusion because it makes a person uncomfortable with the idea that they could be wrong when everything they read reinforces that incorrect conclusion.

PaulHoule 6y ago
Hard to say. By far the worst actor I've seen is (old media) Rush Limbaugh. It's hard to believe that Rush could believe that America faces any threats (e.g. war, crime, economic, environmental) other than the "Democrat party." You'd imagine that he wants to see a system more like Japan (liberalism with one party) or China (one party, no rights, no dissent.) More generally I see the problem of "spamming the agenda", combined with the "if it bleeds it leads" tendency of the media. Before Trump ran for president CNN's ratings were in the toilet, and it lumbered on between school shootings and MH370. To report on things like that you might have to take the Redeye from Atlanta to a flyover state, but today you can sit your ass in Atlanta or Washington DC and just cover 'what trump said', and 'what somebody said about what trump said'. Since the election, the news has seemed to be "broken" in the way that a "clock" breaks. Arstechnica's Dealmaster always has a sale on Amazon Fire devices, Anker power banks, Xbox Gold, and whatever craptop Lenovo has a surplus over. The banner on CNN often seems to go unchanged for weeks. (e.g. "TRUMP WANTED TO FIRE MULLER") COVID-19 was the first real news in a long term, but there is an obsession about "what trump said" compared to the other 300 million Americans. Trump doesn't really care if it is good or bad news, he just wants to be in the news, and if he held a press conference and nobody came, that would bring him to tears. Similarly there is always some article pushed by a right wing group that says there is too much occupational licensing in the U.S (maybe true, but the same editorial turns up every month as if it was fresh) or that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and inequality. (e.g. the evidence is that if you have too much inequality people tilt the scales, rich people buy T-bills depressing interest rates, and try to keep the action for themselves and their children... One of those reasons why Stalin invented the Purge)

nautilus12 6y ago

So they present the facts and let them speak for themselves? Sounds like they had it right. Are you saying if they don't present their opinion its a failure of journalism? I think this new way of defining journalism is a bad standard.

aidanlister 6y ago
People don’t know what is fact and what is fiction. Giving 50/50 air time to climate scientists and climate change deniers is on one side presenting facts and on the other total bullshit and saying “hey these are both valid opinions- you decide”.
- textgel 6y ago
  This isn't climate scientists vs deniers this is major news organisations on both sides; both of which are guilty of presenting total bullshit as facts. Allowing them to be viewed side-by-side permits users to to get a better image of who is willing to miss-lead on which subjects and get facts that have been omitted by the other side.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Just because one side might be more willing to mislead doesn't mean that their stance on a topic is more likely to be the incorrect one. Showing which news sources employ the most underhanded rhetorical devices may be a positive goal in itself, but it doesn't, by itself, help the audience make their own determination on an issue. Even more of an issue is that a viewer's determination of which source is more willing to mislead or omit relevant details is much more likely to be influenced by prior opinion than by the content of either source. Basically, the problem isn't, in itself, biased news sourced, its that the format is fundamentally ill-suited towards giving individuals enough information to come to a reasonably well-supported position on just about any topic of moderate complexity. Further take any topic that appears to be of simple complexity and scratch the surface a bit and there's a decent chance it will turn out to be not so simple.

jumpman500 6y ago

> This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. Is there data that show CNN debates on climate change correlate with a decrease in belief in climate change? This sounds like folk lore rather than reality to me, but I could be wrong.

B4CKlash 6y ago
You're questioning the conclusion rather than the premise(s). It's problem more helpful to look at the premises rather than extrapolating into an argument about the impacts of a particular debate style on popular opinion.
- jumpman500 6y ago
  I didn't want to extend his comment to saying more than it was, or debate his beliefs on what good news is. That's an ethical debate and is always situational on what the news is about, who's watching the news, and when they're watching the news.

Trumpi 6y ago

I would prefer to be persuaded than told what to think. Otherwise, journalists can tell us whatever they want to without any accountability. > Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. That is a shame.

johnday 6y ago
The problem is that for many people, someone appearing persuasive is orthogonal to them actually being correct.
- Trumpi 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the alternative to persuasion is belief and trust.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Sorry, I have to respectfully disagree. This is the model that PBS Nightly News takes: let both sides of an issue talk and treat everyone respectfully. Compare this to MSNBC and Fox News whose business models are really the same: cater to their viewers’ dogma/bubble and reinforce biases, and don’t try to introduce new ideas because it is bad for their business.

SoylentOrange 6y ago
I don’t live in the US, so please take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. I imagine you are a smart and decent person on the other side of this screen. Usually print media is considered higher quality journalism than TV media. There are numerous studies that show reading print media leads to people being more informed than just watching TV news. Whether this is correlation or causation I can’t really say. My understanding of both Fox and MSNBC is they are entertainment programs, not so much news programs. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare those to anything in print, nor do I think it’s entirely possible. A good news article might present both sides of a story, but try to fact-check claims by both sides, and bring in supporting evidence. That’s the key differentiating factor of quality journalism - helping bring facts to the forefront rather than let people on either side spin the facts for their purposes.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  +1 thanks for the great reply.
- Kuzutsukake 6y ago
  As misleading as a particular spin of a story might be, those perspectives are still valid in the sense they connect with what is important to their readers. I'd like to see a news app that has the facts and sensationalism separated, and then a reference to a more relevant fact/story that relates more directly to what a particular spin was getting at. So I guess feed their bubble with more accurate stories.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago

Dansvidania 6y ago

I wish we had more of this going on right now. TV now is pretty much "spoonfeed nation" and reality.

ivanhoe 6y ago

Honestly I'm not convinced. What approach is better then, to invite only the side that you like? If you invite only one side you'll get to hear only one side of the story, it's that simple - and there's far too many subjects that are genuinely still worth a debate - it's not all about climate changes and 5G conspiracies. Journalists are just not proficient enough in the various subjects discussed on TV to be able to counter-argument their guests' theories in a live talk show. So you invite the expert from the other side and expect your guests to do the live fact-checking of the other side's claims for you. It works very good for politicians during the election campaigns, why wouldn't it work for science or any other subject?

runawaybottle 6y ago
The approach needs follow through. If you have both sides just say their sides, and not have arbiters that probe each side, then it’s pointless. Have them both on, and then probe, and even make a decision. The viewers can still choose, but it is much more of an investigation than politely taking turns.
shuntress 6y ago
It is definitely possible to have reasonable debate where both sides are presented equally. But ruling out absurd ideas is incredibly important. If you want to present a discussion on "Selecting sides for the news: How much restriction is too much?" Should the sides be "Industry consensus vs societal consensus" or should you make sure that the "Any censorship is intellectual theft and every news outlet must comply with individual requests for people to state their positions on the topic" side is treated the same as the first two?

fenwick67 6y ago

"Of course there are reasons why a gubernatorial election should not be decided by a ski race, but are there also reasons why it should? For the sake of fairness, we’ve brought in two experts with opposite opinions, who will now have equal time to just say those opinions, because that’s what news is." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUx09Z_SJMI&t=11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUx09Z_SJMI&t=11

Spivak 6y ago
I mean honestly I think the person advocating for the ski-race should probably get more time since that's the stance I am, and the audience presumably, are least familiar with. There are some good faith and sound mind tests that should be applied here but if someone wants to genuinely make a case for choosing a political leader via athletic competition (which has no basis in history at all, nope) then why not hear them out? What are you afraid of?

hitpointdrew 6y ago

> This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. So CNN should get to decide what is correct? Go fuck yourself, and learn how to think. If CNN's audiance can't make their own decisions then that is the fault of the audience not CNN. We don't need, and should abhor, "gatekeepers" of information. Having two opposing sides is 100% the correct way to do journalism.

dang 6y ago
> Go fuck yourself, and learn how to think Ouch. Accounts that post like this get banned here regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't ever do this here again. (We had to warn you about personal attacks once before.)

etangent 6y ago

Are you implying there is only one side one must be allowed to take on climate change?

shuntress 6y ago
Are you implying that "climate change is real" and "climate change is a hoax" must be treated as two equally valid opposing sides?
- malinens 6y ago
  there are many things in between Your 2 options... people can have different opinions on how much of it is caused by people. for example moving to biofuels is being considered a big fuckup and this was done by the biggest supporters of imminent climate catastrophe. There are reasons it is no more global warming but climate change. more progressive people tend to move faster to progress but at the same time they make more errors while doing it..

prox 6y ago

I wonder if it’s interesting to collect a ton of article and compare them for similarity and where they deviate. So you get an article that shows agreement and deviation.

tacon 6y ago

I am showing my age when I remember PBS having an entire show where two sides discussed an important issue of domestic or international concern. It was called "The Advocates"[0]. It ran for five years, and included a moderator and two teams that basically had a debate as a TV show. Michael Dukakis, who later was the Democratic nominee for president, was one of the moderators. (Dukakis' Wikipedia page has no mention that he was on national TV for years before running for president, which is pretty odd.) My understanding is that The Advocates was a result of the fairness doctrine, where television licensees had to show both sides of a subject. When the fairness doctrine went away, so did that show. At the end of every debate, viewers were encouraged to write in about which side they thought won. One reason I read for the demise of the show was that the letters received pretty consistently favored the right wing argument. The modern spin on The Advocates is Intelligence Squared[2]. [0] http://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/advocates/full-program-video http://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/advocates/full-program... [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11014804/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11014804/ [2] https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/ https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/

SoylentOrange 6y ago
I used to watch some of these IQ debates in college, they can be really good. The longer format and strong moderation really lend themselves to interesting discussions, and you can learn a lot. One of my favourite debates of this format (though not IQ) is Peter Thiel vs Eric Schmidt (then executive chairman of Google) arguing about whether Google was still capable of innovation [2012]: https://youtu.be/PsXFwy6gG_4 https://youtu.be/PsXFwy6gG_4

tarkin2 6y ago

Thanks for posting this. Mainly because of the discussion it brought. Basically: airing of unscrutinised claims is propaganda, not news, even if done with both sides.

froh 6y ago

I'm amazed how many people responded to you with this broken idea of "let's hear everybody out." Broken because the talent of listeners to fully evaluate every statement is not distributed evenly. Germany and Europe learned this the very hard way after WWI and they drew consequences after WWII. Yes, I fully agree with you: not all opinions are created equal. Because some are scientifically accepted while others are scientifically rejected. Some are philanthropic, some are antisocial. And we have to take a stance if we want a more humane World, and media have to preselect if we don't want war.

vadansky 6y ago

Keep in mind in the old days people were probably arguing this exact point when saying we shouldn't invite people arguing to free slaves or let women into higher education, because "they are so obviously wrong it's harmful to even listen to them, African Americans do not have the mental acumen to survive in the wild, slavery is compassionate! You're arguing for their deaths!" Anytime people argue about having a authoritarian dedicator style of hard line "DO NOT QUESTION THIS EVER" should remember you might end up on the other side of the fence. We should always listen to the other side. History has shown people can believe ridiculous things for a long time and treat it as common sense.

billme 6y ago

This is literally what news is supposed to do — that is enable multiple & unbiased perspectives on a topic, and if necessary, give equal time to bias opposing views. Otherwise you end up with the “ministry of truth” — and we all know how that worked out.

rsynnott 6y ago

A number of European public broadcasters have some sort of balance rule along these lines. It can get pretty weird. A memorable example, in Ireland, during the campaign for the referendum to legalise same-sex marriage, was a radio news article where they were talking to someone in the hotel industry about the potential impact on the industry from wedding bookings. Because of the balance rule, they then had to have on one of the three available complete lunatics they had for all discussions of same-sex marriage to rant about how the gays were going to transgender all the unborn babies or something (due to all political parties supporting the amendment, and the Catholic Church staying out of it, there were a very small number of public figures available to go on the radio/tv for 'balance', and most of them were conspiracy theorists). Some broadcasters have recently changed the rules around certain subjects; for instance the BBC no longer invites climate change denialists or creationists for 'balance' in most contexts. I'm uncertain how I feel about it. It can produce truly bizarre results, like the marriage one I mentioned, but it does seem useful in some cases. A major concern I'd have about it is that it certainly _is_ used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, especially where one side of the argument is "basically everyone" and the other side is a weird fringe, or where the natural proponents of one side are sitting it out (common on social issues in Ireland, where the Catholic Church is skittish about opposing liberalisation too visibly).