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"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence su

"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation.[1]" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

tomc1985 6y ago
GP's quote implores the reader to do the balancing. When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias. That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Ah, yes... that only works if we are not being actively manipulated. In ideal world all people would be weighing evidence, try to think logically and appeal to timeless, basic principles. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and (what a shocker) half of people have less than 100 IQ. While it is easy to see through most lies most of the time (the logic just isn't there), the goal is not to fool everybody. It is enough to fool just enough people to sow confusion.
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- endymi0n 6y ago
  An important distinction, granted. Although my quote rather questions whether there is always something to balance in the first place. If you try to find the middle ground between truth and a blatant, confident lie that was pulled from thin air to sow doubts on that truth, you get a half-lie — or truth casted in doubt, which was exactly what the lie was made for. Find a fringe case about a dead body voting and you can sow doubts about a whole election. Call out a politician lying once and suddenly it does not matter anymore whether you are lying every day to the casual onlooker. I am absolutely not sure whether censoring such content is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure providing an open microphone and an uncontrolled echo chamber to narcisstic sociopaths backed by Wall Street interests and foreign bot armies isn't either.
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- starfallg 6y ago
  We're inundated with information every day. We don't have enough time in our lifespan to individually process all of that information. Hence we need a system that naturally filters out the noise and out only input to is to ensure that the system is fair.
  - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
    > We're inundated with information every day. We don't have enough time in our lifespan to individually process all of that information. Hence we need a system that naturally filters out the noise and out only input to is to ensure that the system is fair. The system you are referring to is called our discerning minds, and it is already in place. By removing any piece of an argument you are removing the ability of a discerning mind to make a sound judgement.
    - starfallg 6y ago
      And which part of your discerning mind has the superhuman ability to process and fully investigate every bit of information you run across vying for your attention? There's a reason why advertisements work, and it goes hand-in-hand on why ads are regulated.
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      - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
        > And which part of your discerning mind has the superhuman ability to process and fully investigate every bit of information you run across vying for your attention? Good question. Of course, there is no individual human mind capable of such a thing, and so why should such a mind be permitted to decide what the masses get to see?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias. But that's also why the condemnation of balance is misdirected. Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. It isn't choosing how to spend its own words in a newspaper with a finite number of pages or a news channel with a finite amount of airtime, it's choosing what other people can say in a medium with effectively unlimited carrying capacity. It also has a big problem because the platform is simultaneously a medium for the dissemination of information to the public and a medium for the debate of nascent ideas. Suppose that tomorrow we got a claim of widespread election fraud that could actually be substantiated, given a sufficient amount of crowdsourcing or collaboration between experts in different fields. Now they can't even discuss it because the effort to substantiate it involves putting forth a theory that hasn't been substantiated yet?
  - tremon 6y ago
    Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. That's just mincing words. Facebook is very much a communications platform that determines what its users get to see. In that sense, Facebook exercises editorial control over its content, and to its users it makes no difference whether that control is automated or manual. Therefore it doesn't matter whether we classify Facebook as a "journalist", the damage done by Facebook's editorial control is the same.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > That's just mincing words. It isn't. A journalist is choosing what they themselves say out of their own mouths. Anybody attributing everything that third party speakers say via Facebook as the official position of Facebook is false.
glenstein 6y ago
I happen to agree that false balance is a truly profound problem. And I would go so far as to say it's one of a small handful of ideas I wish could be drilled into the head of every consumer of news. I find it to be one of the most underappreciated and incredibly important ideas of the past few decades. All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Russell's approach would be (it seems to me) to have school exercises about false balance, So that the students got harder to manipulate via false balance methods
brobdingnagians 6y ago
Censorship usually involves removing one side's articles and reasoning and not even attempting to dispute it. True balance by taking account of both sides will include rebuttals of the sides against the other side. Both sides should be free to make their case and also make their rebuttals to the other side. Censorship likes to eliminate one side, so that rebuttal and dissent doesn't take place and isn't known. To what degree a piece of information makes one side's claims baseless is often up to interpretation as well. Our claims are often stronger in our own minds than when spoken out loud to others in reasoned discourse. When we accept any one arbiter as the single source of truth for what is true or fake, we have given up reasoned discourse and dissent. We should think for ourselves, and trust others to think for themselves. No one is more totalitarian than the person who thinks only he and his friends are worthy of thinking for and choosing for themselves and that they must protect others from themselves at all costs.
- isv 6y ago
  This is truly the worst aspect of censorship - You don't know what you don't know. And this is being greatly amplified by social media. I am not afraid that I will be fed false information; if it appears too outlandish, I will do sufficient fact-checking before accepting it as truth. In most cases on open platforms someone would have already done fact-checking to debunk. I am afraid however that I become too enwrapped in my social bubble that relevant information never gets brought up in the first place. This is nothing new and relates to "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Most facts can be manipulated by omission, taking things out of context, and choosing favorable metrics, so that you can lie without saying anything falsifiable. Only way to correct this is to allow the other side to present their argument in an open discussion.
  - csnover 6y ago
    What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others. Some believe the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA. Some believe the earth is flat. Some believe a Nigerian prince got their email address from their dead friend’s cousin’s mother’s embassy and is about to send them a billion dollars. How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit? If your main objection to censorship is that it is used to hide the truth, why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit and distributors that enable that behaviour? Just as the left–right political spectrum is actually more of a circle than a straight line, it seems to me that the spectrum of censorship vs free speech is also a circle. A bad actor may obfuscate truth through censorship; a bad actor may also obfuscate truth through massive volumes of misinformation. The latter is what is happening here. It’s a denial of service attack on human brains, and like a DoS attack, the only way to weather it is to filter the malicious traffic—you can’t just add capacity in the form of “good counterpoints” since human brains can’t scale like that.
young_unixer 6y ago
> [...] present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. The idea that some evidence X supports viewpoint Y usually requires some underlying moral assumptions. Many times it's those fundamental moral assumptions that are in discussion, not the evidence itself. For example: if the scientific evidence is "lockdowns stop the spread of the virus", someone may say: "well, this evidence supports my viewpoint that we should be in permanent lock-down until the virus is completely eradicated". But that starts from the assumption that stopping the spread of the virus is always the most important goal and other considerations (economy, education, etc) should be ignored. Fake facts are an issue, but once we agree on facts, we're only halfway there, then we need to agree on what to do based on those facts.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Agreed. There seems to be this assumption among certain partisans that the only reason people disagree with them is because they’ve been lied to. If everyone just knew the truth, then we would obviously be in unanimous agreement on policy etc. First example that comes to mind is the oft-repeated assertion that working class Republican voters have been duped into “voting against their own interests”. I’m of the opinion that misinformation, while dangerous, is often incorrectly blamed for problems that are really caused by fundamental disagreements in morals and values.
- XorNot 6y ago
  This isn't a moral assumption this is just simplistic and stupid. Moral assumptions are pretty close to irrelevant in all practical issues, because they're not the simple little checkboxes people put them into for examples. But then they wouldn't fit in 2 and half sentences and we might actually have an attempt at a reasonable conversation rather then suspiciously starting from the conclusion one side wanted to start with.
- philwelch 6y ago
  Sabine Hossenfelder has a great quote about this: > Science tells us what situation we are in and what consequences our actions are likely to have, but it does not tell us what to do. Science does not say you shouldn’t pee on high voltage lines, it says urine is an excellent conductor. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/09/follow-science-nonsense-i-say.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/09/follow-science-nons...
cacarr 6y ago
Yes, balancing an interview with an astronomer by bringing in an astrologer -- or a alchemist with a chemist.
free_rms 6y ago
Singlow isn't talking about blind both-sidism, though, they're talking about skeptical reading of both (or many!) sides to zero in on the truth.
hammock 6y ago
Not clear to me why false balance is even a thing. It's the job of a paper in its reporting to report things, not to influence opinion. Implicit in "Bothsidesism" is the notion that a paper should have an interest in the direction of influence it provides. That's against the interest of "news" (in the literal sense of the word) and the general proliferation of reported facts. I suppose I'm several decades too late with this take.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Especially as only one side is attacked for not covering "both sides fairly". While the other side is fine for doing the exact opposite. Same goes for stuff like climate change ("Greta took a plane", "Greta has someone writing her speeches", "The guy wote a book, he only wants to sell it"...). That's simply dishonest, and that moderates are even considering taking these arguments into account is simply beyond me.
raxxorrax 6y ago
Remember the Russian election manipulation? I firmly believe any doubt would have been censored because it didn't align with the narrative for which there was zero evidence in the end. Indeed, this was a false balance as it was political propaganda for a party to safe face and explain defeat. This Wikipedia article is bad and it should be removed as it doesn't do anything to further knowledge and the message of the sources was daringly misinterpreted and would not constitute anything different than the anecdote I mentioned in the first paragraph. The article is hostile to thought, thoroughness and honesty at the same time, that is only topped by the shallow word creation that is "bothsidesism", which should constitute assault if written down in earnest.
- andybak 6y ago
  Was there really zero evidence of Russian manipulation?
  - concordDance 6y ago
    Of effective Russian manipulation? Yes. Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? Yep. (I means it's not technically zero evidence as there's evidence of most things, including flat eartherism, it's just tiny compared to the counterevidence or even the complexity penalty)
    - andybak 6y ago
      OK. So you think there was attempted manipulation but it had little effect? > Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? (emphasis mine) There seems to be a caveat here. Could you clarify what you think the evidence did show of contact between the two parties? (EDIT - unusual as it is on this topic I am trying to ask genuine questions and test my own assumptions here. I'm hoping I can learn something)
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    There was nothing. Would you think a suppression of doubt about the accusation should be removed?
corty 6y ago
What needs to be emphasized, because most people misunderstand it (evidence: all the comments around here): The problematic thing is _false_ balance, that is, making a show of representing both sides while actually doing a crappy job for one side. _Real_ balance is something to strive for. False balance might be equally bad or worse than just representing one side. But a properly balanced article is far preferrable to both. And the right approach to fixing false balance is not to remove one viewpoint, but to add arguments, evidence and (if nothing else is available) trustworthy opinions. Also, balance doesn't mean that a reader will go away with a feeling of "this issue is 50-50, might as well throw a coin to decide". Balance in this case should mean that the writer has put a similar amount of effort into understanding and representing both sides. And if the writer happens to lean towards one side and naturally know more about it, that means making up for that inherent bias.
- esarbe 6y ago
  False balance is to pretend that there is a actually another side to the debate. climate-change denial, Trump's election delusion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
piokoch 6y ago
How about Covid-19 Pfizer or Moderna vaccine? Can we discuss that? Or we have to accept that it is great because it is great? Is it allowed to cite Pfizer that in the III tests phase it applied vaccine or placebo to 43 000 people out of which 170 developed COVID-19 - 162 in placebo group and 8 among those vaccinated. On that base vaccine producer claim that they achieved 95% effectiveness. Can we doubt that number because of the small number of people who developed disease? Is that fact somehow proves that Covid is not that infectious as people thought? And so on. Should we believe Swiss regulator who refused to accept vaccine? Or maybe Swiss regulator did that since some Swiss company is working on the vaccine? Can we ask if taking vaccine makes someone non-spreader of the virus? Can we ask if it was tested on older people, people who take a lot of other medicines (like many older people do)? Is seems that people with allergies (what?) should not take vaccine. Was this even testes? There are many pros and cons and doubts, the evidences is one thing, the conclusions might be different. Same with election case. Was there at least one case when we have a prove that election result was manipulated? I think at least one can be found. Why can't this be discussed?
waheoo 6y ago
That wasn't a suggestion for bothsidesim though? It was a suggestion to actually read articles from both sides. Not read one article badly providing 1.25 sides.
visarga 6y ago
I have recently seen two people attacked on Twitter for being balanced and not wanting to take the extreme point of view. I don't think it's healthy to polarize the talk so much.
prvc 6y ago
"False balance" is irrelevant to Russell's point above. He would be the first to explain that the average of two false statements is not necessarily true. The referenced "inference as to what really happened" does not proceed by the method you assume it to do. Indeed, the false-balance problem, where it occurs, is merely another way in which his maxim, "everything in newspapers is more or less untrue" is realized!
tonfreed 6y ago
People say this like they think they're correct. If it turned out they were wrong, you can bet they'd be the first to demand the censure of anything that went against their careful constructed narrative

tomc1985 6y ago

GP's quote implores the reader to do the balancing. When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias. That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance

lmilcin 6y ago
Ah, yes... that only works if we are not being actively manipulated. In ideal world all people would be weighing evidence, try to think logically and appeal to timeless, basic principles. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and (what a shocker) half of people have less than 100 IQ. While it is easy to see through most lies most of the time (the logic just isn't there), the goal is not to fool everybody. It is enough to fool just enough people to sow confusion.
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endymi0n 6y ago
An important distinction, granted. Although my quote rather questions whether there is always something to balance in the first place. If you try to find the middle ground between truth and a blatant, confident lie that was pulled from thin air to sow doubts on that truth, you get a half-lie — or truth casted in doubt, which was exactly what the lie was made for. Find a fringe case about a dead body voting and you can sow doubts about a whole election. Call out a politician lying once and suddenly it does not matter anymore whether you are lying every day to the casual onlooker. I am absolutely not sure whether censoring such content is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure providing an open microphone and an uncontrolled echo chamber to narcisstic sociopaths backed by Wall Street interests and foreign bot armies isn't either.
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starfallg 6y ago
We're inundated with information every day. We don't have enough time in our lifespan to individually process all of that information. Hence we need a system that naturally filters out the noise and out only input to is to ensure that the system is fair.
- dumpsterdiver 6y ago
  > We're inundated with information every day. We don't have enough time in our lifespan to individually process all of that information. Hence we need a system that naturally filters out the noise and out only input to is to ensure that the system is fair. The system you are referring to is called our discerning minds, and it is already in place. By removing any piece of an argument you are removing the ability of a discerning mind to make a sound judgement.
  - starfallg 6y ago
    And which part of your discerning mind has the superhuman ability to process and fully investigate every bit of information you run across vying for your attention? There's a reason why advertisements work, and it goes hand-in-hand on why ads are regulated.
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    - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
      > And which part of your discerning mind has the superhuman ability to process and fully investigate every bit of information you run across vying for your attention? Good question. Of course, there is no individual human mind capable of such a thing, and so why should such a mind be permitted to decide what the masses get to see?
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias. But that's also why the condemnation of balance is misdirected. Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. It isn't choosing how to spend its own words in a newspaper with a finite number of pages or a news channel with a finite amount of airtime, it's choosing what other people can say in a medium with effectively unlimited carrying capacity. It also has a big problem because the platform is simultaneously a medium for the dissemination of information to the public and a medium for the debate of nascent ideas. Suppose that tomorrow we got a claim of widespread election fraud that could actually be substantiated, given a sufficient amount of crowdsourcing or collaboration between experts in different fields. Now they can't even discuss it because the effort to substantiate it involves putting forth a theory that hasn't been substantiated yet?
- tremon 6y ago
  Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. That's just mincing words. Facebook is very much a communications platform that determines what its users get to see. In that sense, Facebook exercises editorial control over its content, and to its users it makes no difference whether that control is automated or manual. Therefore it doesn't matter whether we classify Facebook as a "journalist", the damage done by Facebook's editorial control is the same.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > That's just mincing words. It isn't. A journalist is choosing what they themselves say out of their own mouths. Anybody attributing everything that third party speakers say via Facebook as the official position of Facebook is false.

glenstein 6y ago

I happen to agree that false balance is a truly profound problem. And I would go so far as to say it's one of a small handful of ideas I wish could be drilled into the head of every consumer of news. I find it to be one of the most underappreciated and incredibly important ideas of the past few decades. All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.

cutemonster 6y ago
Russell's approach would be (it seems to me) to have school exercises about false balance, So that the students got harder to manipulate via false balance methods

brobdingnagians 6y ago

Censorship usually involves removing one side's articles and reasoning and not even attempting to dispute it. True balance by taking account of both sides will include rebuttals of the sides against the other side. Both sides should be free to make their case and also make their rebuttals to the other side. Censorship likes to eliminate one side, so that rebuttal and dissent doesn't take place and isn't known. To what degree a piece of information makes one side's claims baseless is often up to interpretation as well. Our claims are often stronger in our own minds than when spoken out loud to others in reasoned discourse. When we accept any one arbiter as the single source of truth for what is true or fake, we have given up reasoned discourse and dissent. We should think for ourselves, and trust others to think for themselves. No one is more totalitarian than the person who thinks only he and his friends are worthy of thinking for and choosing for themselves and that they must protect others from themselves at all costs.

isv 6y ago
This is truly the worst aspect of censorship - You don't know what you don't know. And this is being greatly amplified by social media. I am not afraid that I will be fed false information; if it appears too outlandish, I will do sufficient fact-checking before accepting it as truth. In most cases on open platforms someone would have already done fact-checking to debunk. I am afraid however that I become too enwrapped in my social bubble that relevant information never gets brought up in the first place. This is nothing new and relates to "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Most facts can be manipulated by omission, taking things out of context, and choosing favorable metrics, so that you can lie without saying anything falsifiable. Only way to correct this is to allow the other side to present their argument in an open discussion.
- csnover 6y ago
  What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others. Some believe the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA. Some believe the earth is flat. Some believe a Nigerian prince got their email address from their dead friend’s cousin’s mother’s embassy and is about to send them a billion dollars. How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit? If your main objection to censorship is that it is used to hide the truth, why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit and distributors that enable that behaviour? Just as the left–right political spectrum is actually more of a circle than a straight line, it seems to me that the spectrum of censorship vs free speech is also a circle. A bad actor may obfuscate truth through censorship; a bad actor may also obfuscate truth through massive volumes of misinformation. The latter is what is happening here. It’s a denial of service attack on human brains, and like a DoS attack, the only way to weather it is to filter the malicious traffic—you can’t just add capacity in the form of “good counterpoints” since human brains can’t scale like that.

young_unixer 6y ago

> [...] present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. The idea that some evidence X supports viewpoint Y usually requires some underlying moral assumptions. Many times it's those fundamental moral assumptions that are in discussion, not the evidence itself. For example: if the scientific evidence is "lockdowns stop the spread of the virus", someone may say: "well, this evidence supports my viewpoint that we should be in permanent lock-down until the virus is completely eradicated". But that starts from the assumption that stopping the spread of the virus is always the most important goal and other considerations (economy, education, etc) should be ignored. Fake facts are an issue, but once we agree on facts, we're only halfway there, then we need to agree on what to do based on those facts.

jkhdigital 6y ago
Agreed. There seems to be this assumption among certain partisans that the only reason people disagree with them is because they’ve been lied to. If everyone just knew the truth, then we would obviously be in unanimous agreement on policy etc. First example that comes to mind is the oft-repeated assertion that working class Republican voters have been duped into “voting against their own interests”. I’m of the opinion that misinformation, while dangerous, is often incorrectly blamed for problems that are really caused by fundamental disagreements in morals and values.
XorNot 6y ago
This isn't a moral assumption this is just simplistic and stupid. Moral assumptions are pretty close to irrelevant in all practical issues, because they're not the simple little checkboxes people put them into for examples. But then they wouldn't fit in 2 and half sentences and we might actually have an attempt at a reasonable conversation rather then suspiciously starting from the conclusion one side wanted to start with.
philwelch 6y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder has a great quote about this: > Science tells us what situation we are in and what consequences our actions are likely to have, but it does not tell us what to do. Science does not say you shouldn’t pee on high voltage lines, it says urine is an excellent conductor. http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/09/follow-science-nonsense-i-say.html?m=1 http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/09/follow-science-nons...

cacarr 6y ago

Yes, balancing an interview with an astronomer by bringing in an astrologer -- or a alchemist with a chemist.

free_rms 6y ago

Singlow isn't talking about blind both-sidism, though, they're talking about skeptical reading of both (or many!) sides to zero in on the truth.

hammock 6y ago

Not clear to me why false balance is even a thing. It's the job of a paper in its reporting to report things, not to influence opinion. Implicit in "Bothsidesism" is the notion that a paper should have an interest in the direction of influence it provides. That's against the interest of "news" (in the literal sense of the word) and the general proliferation of reported facts. I suppose I'm several decades too late with this take.

hef19898 6y ago
Especially as only one side is attacked for not covering "both sides fairly". While the other side is fine for doing the exact opposite. Same goes for stuff like climate change ("Greta took a plane", "Greta has someone writing her speeches", "The guy wote a book, he only wants to sell it"...). That's simply dishonest, and that moderates are even considering taking these arguments into account is simply beyond me.

raxxorrax 6y ago

Remember the Russian election manipulation? I firmly believe any doubt would have been censored because it didn't align with the narrative for which there was zero evidence in the end. Indeed, this was a false balance as it was political propaganda for a party to safe face and explain defeat. This Wikipedia article is bad and it should be removed as it doesn't do anything to further knowledge and the message of the sources was daringly misinterpreted and would not constitute anything different than the anecdote I mentioned in the first paragraph. The article is hostile to thought, thoroughness and honesty at the same time, that is only topped by the shallow word creation that is "bothsidesism", which should constitute assault if written down in earnest.

andybak 6y ago
Was there really zero evidence of Russian manipulation?
- concordDance 6y ago
  Of effective Russian manipulation? Yes. Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? Yep. (I means it's not technically zero evidence as there's evidence of most things, including flat eartherism, it's just tiny compared to the counterevidence or even the complexity penalty)
  - andybak 6y ago
    OK. So you think there was attempted manipulation but it had little effect? > Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? (emphasis mine) There seems to be a caveat here. Could you clarify what you think the evidence did show of contact between the two parties? (EDIT - unusual as it is on this topic I am trying to ask genuine questions and test my own assumptions here. I'm hoping I can learn something)
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  There was nothing. Would you think a suppression of doubt about the accusation should be removed?

corty 6y ago

What needs to be emphasized, because most people misunderstand it (evidence: all the comments around here): The problematic thing is _false_ balance, that is, making a show of representing both sides while actually doing a crappy job for one side. _Real_ balance is something to strive for. False balance might be equally bad or worse than just representing one side. But a properly balanced article is far preferrable to both. And the right approach to fixing false balance is not to remove one viewpoint, but to add arguments, evidence and (if nothing else is available) trustworthy opinions. Also, balance doesn't mean that a reader will go away with a feeling of "this issue is 50-50, might as well throw a coin to decide". Balance in this case should mean that the writer has put a similar amount of effort into understanding and representing both sides. And if the writer happens to lean towards one side and naturally know more about it, that means making up for that inherent bias.

esarbe 6y ago
False balance is to pretend that there is a actually another side to the debate. climate-change denial, Trump's election delusion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

piokoch 6y ago

How about Covid-19 Pfizer or Moderna vaccine? Can we discuss that? Or we have to accept that it is great because it is great? Is it allowed to cite Pfizer that in the III tests phase it applied vaccine or placebo to 43 000 people out of which 170 developed COVID-19 - 162 in placebo group and 8 among those vaccinated. On that base vaccine producer claim that they achieved 95% effectiveness. Can we doubt that number because of the small number of people who developed disease? Is that fact somehow proves that Covid is not that infectious as people thought? And so on. Should we believe Swiss regulator who refused to accept vaccine? Or maybe Swiss regulator did that since some Swiss company is working on the vaccine? Can we ask if taking vaccine makes someone non-spreader of the virus? Can we ask if it was tested on older people, people who take a lot of other medicines (like many older people do)? Is seems that people with allergies (what?) should not take vaccine. Was this even testes? There are many pros and cons and doubts, the evidences is one thing, the conclusions might be different. Same with election case. Was there at least one case when we have a prove that election result was manipulated? I think at least one can be found. Why can't this be discussed?

waheoo 6y ago

That wasn't a suggestion for bothsidesim though? It was a suggestion to actually read articles from both sides. Not read one article badly providing 1.25 sides.

visarga 6y ago

I have recently seen two people attacked on Twitter for being balanced and not wanting to take the extreme point of view. I don't think it's healthy to polarize the talk so much.

prvc 6y ago

"False balance" is irrelevant to Russell's point above. He would be the first to explain that the average of two false statements is not necessarily true. The referenced "inference as to what really happened" does not proceed by the method you assume it to do. Indeed, the false-balance problem, where it occurs, is merely another way in which his maxim, "everything in newspapers is more or less untrue" is realized!

tonfreed 6y ago

People say this like they think they're correct. If it turned out they were wrong, you can bet they'd be the first to demand the censure of anything that went against their careful constructed narrative