These past few years have been a time of tumult for most journalistic organizations. Various forms of modern media, such as the Internet and cable television, they have challenged the dominance of print and network television, and have also challenged the orthodoxy of whether “the news” should express an opinion. The ratings successes of Fox News and conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, to speak nothing of the Internet, have led to much soul searching among both journalists and political observers about the role of objectivity, and where the line can be crossed (if at all).

Mainstream, non-ideological journalism has struggled to respond to this seismic shift. In the realm of cable news, CNN has for years lagged behind Fox News and MSNBC in primetime ratings, a gap many observers attribute to their insistence on a centrist journalistic outlook. Meanwhile, public distrust of the media in the US is now at a record high, with 48 per cent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll agreeing with the classic lament of “liberal bias” and a much smaller 15 per seeing the media as “too conservative.” The fact that this many people perceive the media as biased is not necessarily condemning in and of itself—the results also showed that self-described liberals and conservatives were more likely to believe the media is biased against their own viewpoint. However, conservative complaints of media bias have been around so long as to become almost a trite and perfunctory complaint of right wing partisans, only true in particularly rare and egregious cases. 

Rather, it’s the left wing’s claims of conservative bias in the media that are more interesting; not because they are actually true overall, but because the intellectual framework which underpins much of this left wing critique, the idea of “false balance” or “equivalence,” is both more complex and revolves around a clear and easily observable phenomenon in journalism. The basic idea behind the charge of “false equivalence” is that there are cases in which journalists make direct comparisons to “things that have significant differences in degree or in kind,” in the words of the left-wing media pressure group Media Matters. The basic result of this, in the words of FAIR, another left wing media pressure group, is that “coverage that insists on a false even-handedness, while pretending to expose political mendacity, actually gives cover for it by neutralizing criticism with the ‘they all do it’ defence.” This sort of unintended falsehood is often seen as the result of an eagerness to present an “objective” account of events.

This supposed “false equivalence” can be seen as an offshoot or logical result of what the noted NYU journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen refers to as “he said, she said” reporting. Reporters are given easily verifiable, competing truth claims about an issue, but the actual “truth” of these claims is left for the reader or viewer to decide. The problems with this sort of reporting are obvious; the viewer or listener probably does not have the time to research any aspect of a major news story at the primary source level, hence the journalist’s existence in the first place. Second, when this does happen, those who game the political system are given an unintended cover by way of their more objectionable actions being equated with far less objectionable ones.

However, the danger in journalists making a conscious effort to avoid this equivalence is that they may end up “adjudicating” truth claims in situations where—from an impartial perspective—the facts are more ambiguous or are subject to legitimate interpretation—for example, when ending a tax deduction is referred to by political opponents as a “tax increase.” In a case like that, to actually declare one turn of phrase manipulative or wrong would be to effectively take a side in the larger argument, something that non-ideological journalism rightly shies away from. That said, the frequent existence of “false balance” in news coverage, especially in the political realm, is a bigger problem than the potential overreach that could occur were journalists given freer rein to actually sort out facts from spin.