“Balance” is supposed to be a good word, but it can be bogus.

If I were to write an article about you, and asked a dozen people what you were like, and if I happened to know that some of those people were lying about you, I’m sure you would not appreciate it if I included those liars’ testimonies in my piece side by side with other testimonies, on the supposed justification that I was providing “balance” by letting everyone have a say.

Or even (less malevolently than slothfully) if I were too lazy to go out and find the best witnesses I could about a person or a story or an event, contenting myself instead to scare up any old dozen witnesses — in order to scoop a story or meet my editor’s deadline — would I not be acting deceitfully? Ten times zero is still zero.

A fact checker for the political watchdog website politifact.com says the media have been “scared into a sense of false balance.”

Our unhappy cultural confluence of a ratcheted-up news machine, on the one hand, and a postmodernism that largely rejects the old-fashioned notion of “the truth” in preference for the relativistic notion of “my truth” and “your truth,” is heading us for a train wreck. It has become “the norm…to quote person A’s and person B’s account of what transpired, balancing various subjective views in the oft-vain hope that objective truth would emerge” (Journalism & Humility, Marvin Olasky).

I do not envy journalists. Theirs is the thankless job of providing information in a fashion “timely” and “accurate,” marching orders at cross purposes with each other. There is no simple solution, only the abiding challenge to courage.

	Topic: Front Page, The Nation		Email a friend
	Keywords: journalism, journalistic objectivity, truth		RSS 2.0
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