Balance

Does everyone deserve an equal voice, even if they’re wrong?


We see it all the time, but especially when an election is coming up: the idea of balance in reporting, that both sides get an equal stake in the air time or print media to put forward their views and that one side is not unfairly left out of the process.


But sometimes, we see it when an incident has happened and you just know that there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, but the media will give just as much air time to the wrong answer as if it’s just as deserving of the attention as the right answer.


Ok, this can be subjective, and some people might agree with what I perceive as the wrong answer. I’m not by any stretch saying that I am the arbiter of right and wrong. It’s just that, well, sometimes, it’s obvious.


Take medical breakthroughs, for example. This most often occurs when vaccines are made or new medications are being trialled. The journalists will report on the story, because we (the public) like to know what’s going on in the world, especially if it’s going to affect us or someone we know. The trouble comes when they give a pseudoscience practitioner air time as if they are just as credentialled as the doctors who have just spent many years developing the medical breakthrough in question.


I would like to see journalists, if they insist of talking to every crackpot with a conspiracy theory, actually take them to task over their claims. If they complain about the level of scary sounding things in vaccines, like formaldehyde, ask them if they’re aware that there is a significantly higher amount of it in fruit (in that particular case) and don’t let them off with just spouting their own agenda without asking them to back up their claims, just like the scientists and doctors have to.


Another example is the recent protests in America over reopening certain states prior to case numbers falling, or a vaccine being available. They’re no protesting against reopening the state. They’re protesting for it. One woman stood, face covered so she couldn’t be identified, with a placard that read “Sacrifice the Weak” and it turned my stomach. But people like her are not only being photographed, they’re being interviewed on local, state, national and international broadcasts as if their opinion that we should let the old, the infirm, the disabled and the immunocompromised die is as valid as the vast majority of people who are crying out for people to stay at home and maintain social distancing methods in the midst of a global pandemic.


In the modern world there is little excuse for ignorance if you live in a developed nation. I will end this piece with a quote that sums up this whole problem, by Isaac Asimov (American writer and professor of biochemistry):

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'