The "Balance" Fallacy

Of the many baneful effects of the rise of Fox News, the perversion of the word "balance" must be at or near the top.  Rather than forthrightly declaring their conservative perspective, they disingenuously insist that their news coverage is "fair and balanced."  They sometimes allow a milquetoast and ineffective figure like Alan Colmes on air to weakly present a liberal perspective, and then pretend that makes for "balance."

This has been true for years now, but two recent news stories pointedly drove home for me the pervasive distortion of the idea of "balance."

On the ninth anniversary of 9/11, the Portland Press Herald in Maine ran a front-page story about the end of the Muslim observance of Ramadan.  The editor subsequently apologized for running the story because many readers found it "offensive."  He went on to say: "We have acknowledged that we erred by at least not offering balance to the story."

The logic of this is curious to say the least.  What exactly required "balance" here?  The implication is that it was wrong to cover the peaceful religious celebrations of American Muslims on 9/11 without acknowledging the awful thing 19 other (mostly Saudi) Muslims did nine years ago.  I defy anyone to find anything in the article itself that is offensive.  The focus of the story is a religious community gathering to raise funds for the needy.  But somehow it lacks "balance" because there was no mention of the terrorist attacks in 2001.

This is the same collective guilt mentality that pervades the opposition to the Islamic center in lower Manhattan.  The idea that "positive" coverage of any Muslim event requires "balance" in the form of acknowledgement of 9/11 carries the clear implication that the crime of 9/11 is something that all Muslims carry, like original sin.

There is nothing "balanced" about that.  Quite the contrary, it is inherently imbalanced.  That mindset insists that the murderous acts of a small group of religiously motivated fanatics must forever weigh down one side of the scales.

The Texas Board of Education this week passed a resolution to curtail references to Islam in world history texts.  According to a New York Times article, 

“The purpose of this resolution is to ensure there is balanced treatment of divergent groups,” Gail Lowe, the chairwoman of the board, said. “In the past, the textbooks have had some bias against Christianity.”

According to an AP article, this charge is ostensibly based on the fact that a text (no longer in use) "devoted more lines of text to Islamic beliefs and practices than Christian ones."


In this case, "balance" is defined quantitatively, and "more lines" equals imbalance.  It seems blindingly obvious to me that schoolchildren in Texas, an overwhelmingly Christian state, might need to read more "lines" about Islam than Christianity to gain an equal knowledge of both, given that they are highly likely to already know quite a bit about the latter.


The resolution makes clear, however, that it is not just about space.  It denounces both "significant inequalities of coverage space-wise" and "demonizing or lionizing one or more of them over the others." Though this language seems to call for equality, the chairwoman's statement above makes it clear that they believe that only Christianity is being demonized and Islam lionized.  Not surprisingly, they seem to offer no specific examples of this beyond the "space-wise" reference.


So what does "balance" mean here?  Conforming to the ideological preferences of the board.  The author of the resolution, Randy Rives, inadvertently exposed the real agenda: "If you can control or influence our education system, you can start taking over the minds of the young people."  He thought he was talking about his phantom enemies, but he was truly talking about himself.


"Balance" does not mean ensuring one's preferred outcome in a discussion.  It does not mean mechanically giving equal "space."  It does not mean finding one "pro" and one "con" perspective and presenting both (no good historian would "balance" a discussion of the Holocaust with a Holocaust denier's point of view).  It means honestly airing material with a focus on facts and a dedication to divining the ever-elusive truth.  But the word has become so debased today that people rarely seek true balance.  Is it any wonder that our political discourse is so out of balance?

Where have you gone, Joe Friday?

The Holocaust was the topic in my western civ class yesterday. Due to the prevalence of Holocaust deniers on the internet, I always feel obliged to address their existence and warn students against being drawn into their fantasy world. One student asked how anyone could believe such nonsense, and a good discussion about the difference between historical interpretation and historical fact followed. We can have a serious and substantial debate, I told them, about why the Holocaust happened, or how complicit the German public was in what the Nazis did. But there is no debate over whether it happened. That would be like debating not whether FDR was a great president but whether he ever existed.

The discussion has had me thinking about what makes so many people susceptible to denialism. It seems to be everywhere these days. Despite categorical statements from responsible public officials, millions of Americans continue to express doubts that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. (You can see a complete debunking of the birther nonsense here.) According to a recent New York Times poll, 20% of Americans do not believe Obama was born in the U.S. and another 23% say they don't know. More than 40% of Americans either deny or express doubts about an empirically verifiable fact. (Among Republicans, 32% deny Obama's citizenship, and the number is 40% among those describing themselves as "very conservative.")

Writing in Forbes, Bruce Barlett points out that Tea Party supporters think that taxes are three times higher than they actually are. A CBS poll showed that only 2% of Tea Party supporters knew that taxes had gone down under Obama, while 46% mistakenly thought taxes had stayed the same and 44% thought that taxes had gone up--the exact opposite of the truth.

It is tempting to dismiss such denialism as pure ignorance, and in some cases, that may be true. But according to the New York Times poll on the Tea Partiers, they are more educated than the general public. Yet, in the CBS poll, they were far more likely than the general public to get the facts wrong about taxes, which is supposedly their main concern. They are also more likely to doubt that Obama was born in the U.S.

Something else is going on, when large numbers of otherwise intelligent people deny the truth of demonstrable facts. Ideology is trumping reality.

The answer may lie in the New York Times poll which shows that nearly two-thirds of Tea Party supporters get most of their news from Fox News, and a majority of them believe that shows like Glenn Beck's and Sean Hannity's are "news," not opinion or entertainment. More than any other media organization, Fox News has blurred (if not obliterated) the line between fact and opinion. Truth is determined not by reasoned analysis based on facts, but on who speaks the loudest, and which "facts" are repeated most frequently.

Though the term "spin" is relatively new, the phenomenon certainly is not. Politics has always involved a degree of selectivity and interpretation and always will. But what we're seeing here is not spin but outright distortion and lies. We've become so accustomed to spin that we dismiss whatever comes out of the mouths of our political adversaries as false, with little regard to reality.

Our distrust of spin has devolved into a nihilistic fear that in politics there are no facts, only spin. Our desire to escape the spin is the appeal behind Bill O'Reilly's self-proclaimed "no-spin zone." We all want a straight shooter, a political Joe Friday who will give us "just the facts." And that's what O'Reilly (and Fox in general, with its "We report, you decide" slogan) disingenuously promises.

A couple of years ago, I watched a segment on O'Reilly's show, as I occasionally do. I forget the issue being discussed, but in the typical "fair and balanced" style of Fox, there were two guests on opposing sides of the issue. O'Reilly, not surprisingly, came down on the side of his conservative guest. When the liberal guest tried to make a factual point, O'Reilly cut him off, saying it's two to one, you lose. That, it seems, is how you determine truth in the "no-spin zone"--you stack the deck for one side and then vote.

Too often, that is what our political discourse has become. Rarely are pundits and commentators held to any factual standard. Back in May 2008, Chris Matthews dismantled talk radio blowhard Kevin James by simply asking him a factual question over and over again when James charged that Obama's foreign policy was "appeasement." Matthews relentlessly repeated: "What did Neville Chamberlain do?" It soon became painfully apparent that James had no idea what appeasement was, just that it was "bad thing" and it would harm Obama by flinging the charge at him. Whether there was any factual basis for the comparison was irrelevant to him.

One of the most common retorts in our political shouting contests has become "you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts." Sadly, often that seems not to be the case. We need a renewed commitment to facts. Obama's critics are entitled to disapprove of his policies, but they are not entitled to believe he has raised taxes when he has cut them. There are empirically verifiable facts. We can disagree about what they mean, but not what they are. To abandon the common ground of fact is to descend into the fantasy world of denialism.