False balance

How it works

A TV panel: one climate scientist, one blogger who disagrees, and a host saying “let’s hear both sides”. A comment: “This party stole, the last one stole, they’re all the same.” Two different sentences, one move. Something lopsided (ninety-seven to three, a court verdict against a rumour, a decade of corruption against a parking fine) is presented as fifty-fifty. The audience then does the natural thing with a fifty-fifty and concludes that nothing can be known.

Journalism’s version grew out of a good instinct. Reporters are trained to give the other side a hearing, which protects people from one-sided hit pieces. But the rule was designed for disputes between people and gets applied to disputes between claims. Fairness to people means letting them speak. Fairness to claims means telling the reader how much evidence sits behind each one. Skip the second part and a lone dissenter gets a stage the evidence never earned.

This has been measured. Maxwell and Jules Boykoff went through fifteen years of coverage in the big US newspapers and found that most articles on global warming gave roughly equal space to the scientific consensus and to the handful who rejected it: balance that, in their phrase, worked as bias. British coverage of the MMR vaccine in the early 2000s did the same with a single study, later retracted, and polls at the time found many readers believed the science was split. In 2018 the BBC issued internal guidance telling staff that impartiality does not require a climate denier in every climate segment. The political version (“they’re all equally bad”) needs no newsroom at all. It is the cheapest way to sound wise in a comment thread.

Example

@the_evening_panel, 1d TONIGHT: Is the vaccine safe? We ask an immunologist AND a mother who did her own research. Two sides. You decide.

@tired_of_all_of_it, 20h Minister X took a bribe, minister Y took a bribe ten years ago. Same thing, different colour. Why would anyone even vote.

The first post sets up a draw between a body of evidence and one person’s browsing history. The second declares a draw between two cases without looking at either. Were the sums, the proof and the consequences actually alike? Nobody asked, because the tie was the point.

Why it works on you

• It feels like fairness. Hearing both sides is a value you hold, and the trick wears its clothes. But balance means weighing, not refusing to weigh. Whataboutism is the mirror image: there, one side’s sin is used to excuse the other’s.
• A tie is restful. If both are equally bad, you are excused from reading further, choosing, or acting. Cynicism feels like sophistication and costs nothing, until you notice who benefits when nobody can be judged. See nothing is true, everyone lies.
• Formats carry authority. A panel, a split screen, a “debate”: the staging says “serious disagreement among serious people” before anyone has spoken. One of the chairs may belong to a fake expert; the format does not care.

What to do

When someone does it to you: ask about weight. “Both sides exist, sure, but how much evidence sits behind each?” For “they’re all the same”, ask for the two cases side by side: the amount, the proof, what happened next. Equal things survive that comparison; unequal things do not.

When you catch yourself doing it: “both sides are bad” is sometimes true and always easy. Before saying it, check whether you have actually compared, or whether you are tired. Being unable to tell two things apart is a fact about your afternoon, not about the two things.

In a comment section: do not argue that one side is pure. Argue that the comparison is lazy: “Could be. Put the two cases next to each other and let’s see.” Then link the page.

Don’t confuse it with

• Reporting real disagreement. When experts are genuinely split, showing both positions is accurate, not false balance.
• Criticising both sides. You are allowed to think two parties both did wrong. The trick is using “both” to skip the question of how wrong, and by how much.