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"Balanced" reporting is biased

I often think society is overly obsessed with bias in the media. Or perhaps to put it in another way it rails at one kind of bias and ignores another.

First, there can really be no such thing as an entirely objective reporting, or if there was it would be too bland and uninformative. Second, different weight needs to be given to different opinions. The same amount of words or time doesn't need to be given to opposing views if they have little credibility or merit.

Sharon Beder wrote a great opinion piece about this in The Age yesterday.

The officious policing of impartiality and balance will mean ensuring that statements by those challenging the establishment (government or business) are balanced with statements by those whom they are criticising, though not necessarily the other way round.

Too much emphasis on objectivity in news and current affairs can lead journalists to leave out interpretations and analysis, which might be construed as personal views, and to play it safe by reporting events without explaining their meaning and keeping stories light and superficial so as not to offend anyone.

Journalists who accurately report what their sources say, can effectively remove responsibility for their stories onto the people they interview and quote. The ideal of objectivity therefore encourages uncritical reporting of official statements and those of authority figures. In this way, the biases of individual journalists are avoided but institutional biases are reinforced.

The enforcement of impartiality tends to give powerful industry spokespeople guaranteed access to the media, no matter how flimsy their argument or how transparently self-interested. No such access is guaranteed to critics.

No where is this more evident than in reporting on climate change. Despite the overwhelming scientific consensus (not to mention clearly visible evidence) that climate change is happening, media reports often include the opinions of pseudo-scientific experts who disagree that climate change is real. Often these experts are funded by fossil fuel companies or other groups with vested interests.

Beder writes,

In their attempts to be balanced on a scientific story, journalists may use any opposing view even when it has little scientific credibility in the wider scientific community. This can be very misleading. In the case of global warming, the fossil fuel industry has taken advantage of this convention by funding a handful of dissidents and demanding that they are given equal media coverage despite their poor standing in the scientific community.

This strategy of exaggerating the uncertainties and confusing the public has ensured that governments such as the Howard Government have been able to avoid doing anything to prevent global warming, despite the overwhelming evidence that significant global warming is likely without government intervention.

It is only recently, after many precious years have been lost, that the most intransigent governments have been forced to admit that action must be taken to avoid global warming. Some ask why this has not occurred earlier. Clearly part of the problem has been the ability of vested interests to manipulate the media by holding up the rod of balance and impartiality.

There has been a noticeable shift in media reporting on climate change in the past year or so. It may be decades too late, but hopefully those who dispute climate change will soon belong in the same category as creation scientists or flat earthers. Then we can start working to solve this problem and not just argue about it.

Technorati tags: climate change | global warming | media bias | journalism | Sharon Beder

Labels: climate change, media

posted by David @ 6:47 AM