Fair and Balanced Isn't

Continual conservatives complaints about the media are paying important dividends for Republicans as the media has become too frightened to give context for events and instead look to report on stories on a "fair and balanced" manner.

Instead of pointing out that in event after event that Republicans are more guilty, or push the envelope to a greater level than Democrats, the media has slunk to supplying muddled mush to the public.

Unfortunately only a few in the media have noticed. In 2004 ABC's political director Mark Halperin complained about the press pursuing an artificial balance in truth-squadding the claims and charges of the Bush and Kerry campaigns, saying that the media would usually run through an equal list of questionable statements by each candidate, giving the impression that both candidates were equally stretching the truth. Instead Halperin said that although both President Bush and Kerry distorted the truth, the Bush team has gone way beyond what Kerry has done.

The New York Review of Books outlined a similar case involving the LA Times. Ken Silverstein sent a memo to an editor on a story he wrote on voting irregularities in Missouri saying the "insistence on 'balance' is totally misleading, adding there was "a real effort on the part of the GOP...to suppress pro-Dem constituencies." The GOP complaints, by contrast, "concern isolated cases that are not going to impact the outcome of the election."

In "The Republican War on Science" (reviewed in the New York Times) author Chris Mooney wrote that "politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses, but they are almost never as guilty as the Right."

Recently stories on Jack Abramoff seem to try to mention he gave money to members of both parties, implying equal guilt yet the money and numbers of legislators involved were vastly different.

As Silverstein said, "Balanced" is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers." Not to be cynical, but Conservatives apparently figured out how to game the "fair and balanced" approach.