False Balance Part 1
By Gloria Feldt I’m not a journalist. I make no claim to be. I’m an advocate and author. Writing commentary is a big part of what I do. Writing commentary is all about having a point of view. And I do have a point of view, no bones about it. But I am first and foremost a citizen seeking after intelligent and trustworthy media reporting about a multiplicity of issues. And second, I want a truly fair and balanced playing field. I am secure enough in my point of view not to need more than that.
I made the transition, crossing over to the other side to be the media rather than merely pitching my stories to the media, because I came to realize it is the kiss of death to be seen as an advocate in the eyes of journalists reporting on a story. You immediately get put into a very small box labeled “extremists on one side,” which is placed in a simplistic polar opposition to “extremists on the other side.” In my years at Planned Parenthood, I cannot tell you how many times I found myself asking a reporter who insisted in “balancing”—say–announcement of a new health center with a quote from an anti-abortion advocate: “Excuse me, just what is the other side of a pap smear?”
This brings up some rather fundamental questions: What are the requirements of fairness in reporting an issue where there is more than one point of view? Are fair and balanced one and the same? What then is balance? When is what’s passed off as balance actually an illusion that corrupts the truth?
I’ve identified at least five kinds of what I have come to call false balance. The first is: False Balance #1: Creating “the other side” when there is none
When Dr. Barnett Slepian was murdered in cold blood in his kitchen in front of his children by an anti-abortion zealot because he provided abortions in his OB/GYN practice, among many other services, I was asked to appear on CNN Talk Back Live with Bobbie Batista. I was assured this would not be a debate, but rather a discussion of this crime. What happened, in actuality, was quite different. I was not live with the host and the audience, I was in a “box”, in a room with a camera pointed at me so that I couldn’t see what was happening on the set.
We went live and I discovered that they had a representative from “the other side.” This was the one and only time that I had ever excoriated a news anchor right on camera. “What is the other side to murder? There is none.” Creating another “side” in this case to provide “balance” would be just like having gay bashers justify the killing of Mathew Shepard. Was there another side to the terrorist attacks on 9/11? Of course not. Yet the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were just as sure of their rightness and righteousness as the men who murdered doctors who provided abortions.
It’s fine and legitimate to debate abortion when the subject is abortion—or any other topic. But sometimes there simply isn’t a way to balance the story. Sometimes there simply isn’t an “other side”.
Next: The media’s hunger for sensational false balance in order to concoct a story and failure to separate fact from opinion when setting up balancing sides of an issue.
July 13th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
A splendid and wonderfully provocative thesis, Gloria. Fox News claims to be fair and balanced but isn’t. Now that I think of it, I actually think I was when in the worst days of campus turmoil I tried to give both sides of the most neuralgic issues of US foreign policy. I wold argue that isnt the same as giving “both sides of murder or rape or mass killing of innocents in the name of am abstract cause.’ll be fascinated by your subsequent chapters…..Linc