Lloyd Shepherd picks up the John Lanchester article I referenced yesterday, and highlights yet another excellent passage:
"The problem with ‘balance’ is partly a problem with the way science is
reported. ‘Balance’ works, sort of, as a way of discussing politics in
a two-party system. (Though it has to be said that the remorseless
polarisation, whereby I say yah because you said boo, is one main
reason for the decreased interest in party politics.) Since the climate
debate has been polarised on left-right lines in the US, it has seemed
appropriate to the media to treat it as a polarised issue, one on which
there are two schools of thought, which, in respect of the science, it
isn’t: there is one school of thought, and a few nutters."
I liked that bit too - it reminded me of a tale my geography-studying friends used to tell at university. Apparently one lecturer would begin his course on glaciation with the statement that were "nominally two schools of thought concerning glaciation - the extreme views of Kelloway, and the truth", and go on to demolish the former in short order.
Whenever I'm confronted by this "balance" chimera in news reporting - especially as it pertains to the willingness of journalists to pander to the agenda of the (let's face it, unremittingly evil) global warming deniers - I remember that lecturer, and reflect that that's what "balance" really looks like, when the commentator has the expertise and the confidence to cut through the fog of dissenting views and present the audience with an accurate picture of the current expert consensus. (Or as we say more commonly in English, "the truth".)
"Balance" is what you default to if the reporter, commentator, anchor or other journalist simply doesn't have the expertise to adjudicate between two ostensibly plausible points of view and call "bullshit" on the one that's wrong. "Balance" is a chimera to disguise the fact that while a global-warming-denying pseudo-scientist knows a lot less about global warming than a real scientist, he still knows plenty more than the guy on the TV who gets to interview him. Enough, say, to pull the wool over the eyes of that interviewer and by extension the public for more than a decade with the pretence that there's still a debate going on about man-made climate change. There simply isn't a debate - there is, as Lanchester reminds us, "one school of thought and a few nutters".
I pointed earlier in the year to Jeremy Burke's research showing that "the desire to appear unbiased leads
to information loss". It's still true. Better than balance, we need the news presented to us by people who, like the geography lecturer of yore*, have the expertise and confidence to get the extreme minority view out of the way in a couple of sentences and go on to explain to us what legitimate experts consider the truth.
*1994 doesn't feel like yore really. Not yet, anyway.