This really needs to be understood and practiced more widely. The golden standard of journalism is not balance; it is objectivity. Both sides of an issue (an idea which is also fallacious and overly-reductive) do not always deserve equal consideration. Often times one side is firmly rooted in reality while its opposition persists in spite of reality. Media outlets do not need to give equal time to homeopaths, global warming deniers, evolution deniers, and anti-vaxxers any more than they need to give equal time to Big Foot hunters and 9/11 truthers. An objective medias job is to report, as best they can, science news without promoting marginalized, fantasy-based ideas. When paradigm-shifting discoveries are made, let the scientific method run its course, and let its professional practitioners do their jobs to adequately test said discoveries and work out their implications, as these topics certainly cannot be adequately represented, contemplated, or resolved by the media nor in the court of public opinion. Article quoted below. The BBC Trust on Thursday published a progress report into the corporation’s science coverage which was criticised in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose non-contentious issues. The report found that there was still an ‘over-rigid application of editorial guidelines on impartiality’ which sought to give the ‘other side’ of the argument, even if that viewpoint was widely dismissed.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 01:02:28 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015