Blue Skirt: What’s the meaning of 'fair and balanced'?
Posted by Alice Lieberman on Oct 15th, 2007
Red Skirt is venting considerable fury at (of all things) the League of Women Voters. What has her particularly vexed is that they are (a) promoting the issue of climate change, in particular that it is caused by our profligate non-renewable energy use; (b) they do not provide the other side the opportunity to present their point of view; and (c) despite this, they have the gall to present themselves as non-partisan.
| • Read the Red Skirt entry Alice is responding to. |
Well, now I guess she knows what it’s like for a liberal to watch Fox News! Seriously, does any sentient human being think that the Fox News Channel is “fair and balanced,” as their slogan trumpets? The closest they get to it is “Hannity and Colmes,” but “liberal” Alan Colmes is a wimpy foil for blowhard conservative Hannity. And Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes wouldn’t have it any other way. If one wants to go into high dudgeon over the unfairness of fake neutrality, let’s start there! I would further point out that, unlike Fox News, the League does not pull any punches in the prologue to their mission statement:
“Wholeheartedly political” organizations whose purpose is to “influence policy through advocacy” behave exactly the way the League behaved in Wilmette: they educate the public to their point of view. In my book, they’re a lot more honest than Fox News.
But Red Skirt brings up another, perhaps larger point, in her treatise, and that is the question of whether our national discourse should treat all points of view equally.
Consider: in 2005, Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt was invited to speak at Harvard University about her recently published book, History on Trial” (Harper-Collins). The trial of the title refers to a libel trial in the United Kingdom, in which defendant Lipstadt was required to defend statements made (in a previous book, “Denying the Holocaust”) about infamous Holocaust denier and “historian” David Irving. Essentially, she called him a liar. “History on Trial” is her account of her experience as a defendant. In any event, she was pleased to hear that C-SPAN wanted to broadcast her speech: exposure to a national audience is what every author wants. Then she learned that C-SPAN, in the interests of “balance,” was going to also broadcast a speech of Irving’s. In the end, Lipstadt decided to not allow C-SPAN to broadcast her speech if they insisted on this arrangement. It’s pretty obvious why, but let Richard Cohen of the Washington Post articulate it:
In my own state of Kansas, the same thing occurred with the “intelligent design” gang. Our state School Board, until 2005, was primarily composed of people who believe in “intelligent design.” They call it a theory, but virtually the entire scientific community thinks of it as creationism stuffed into a Trojan horse. Thus, when the School Board wanted to sponsor a “debate” between the anti-Darwinist “intelligent design” proponents and those scientists who have actually studied the historical record, the scientists refused. Why?
Because it is a disservice to the public to suggest that that there is “a raging controversy among the world’s most prominent biologists about the basic explanatory force of evolution. There is no controversy. Human evolution began millions, not thousands of years ago (as the ID proponents suggest), and we do our students a disservice when we engage with intelligent design proponents: it implies that there is disagreement where there is none.
Both Lipstadt, in the first instance, and the Kansas scientists in the second, were right not to share a platform or provide exposure to the countervailing points of view.
The difference between these two examples of “one-sidedness” and Red Skirt’s example of the one-sidedness of the Wilmette League of Women Voters is, in my view, only one of degree. If one believes that global warming is the most serious ecological threat to the planet, then it would be foolish, negligent, and harmful to engage in polite “debate” out of some misguided sense of fairness. It is the consensus of scientific opinion that the climate of our planet is being affected by human activity. Those who object to this “inconvenient truth” — either the science, or its conclusions — might be interested in joining organizations that counter the work of the League.
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