False Equivalence

Fair does not mean equal

I’ve been writing about politics and media for a number of years now. I used to love them both, and now I sort of hate them both. I had a long-term client who worked his way to the top of a broadcasting company. He said something that resonates with me to this day. Just as they say not to meet your heroes, for they will surely disappoint, he said that the higher you get in an industry, the farther you’ll be from the reasons you went into the field in the first place.

He had begun his career as a disc jockey in Pittsburgh because he loved music, and interpersonal communication. By the time he spoke those words, he was in a top-floor corner office, about as far removed from the street-level studio as one could get and still be in broadcasting.

I am mostly retired now, and write primarily for myself, but as a former president of radio stations and networks, and the consulting firm that I operated for 37 years, I know exactly what he meant.

Fragmentation and competition have allied to diminish a once great industry. Our independent media is now just another Wall Street monolith, intent only on growing quarterly profits. I’m a staunch capitalist with a deep respect for guardrails. Unregulated and unchecked capitalism leads to monopolies and dangerous products. For the mainstream media, keeping up with the opinion media has meant compromises in the worst places. Just as in war, truth has been the first casualty, and false equivalence has led the battle.

Journalist Margaret Sullivan succinctly defines false equivalence in journalism as “Equalizing the unequal for the sake of seeming fair.” She’s a former Public Editor of the New York Times, and she’s concerned about false equivalence in the corporate media, including the “paper of record,” which like it or not, the Times is. “There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.”

The corporate media has come to believe that fairness and accuracy are the same thing. They are not. A great example is the recent scandal perpetrated at Arlington National Cemetery by the ex-president’s campaign. If we as a nation have any sacred ground, Arlington most assuredly is it. In defiance of common sense and common decency (what’s new, huh?), not to mention long-standing military policy, they turned a moment of remembrance and grace into a campaign photo-op, arguing that policy against such filming was suspended since both were okay with the family. That is nonsense, and they know it as well as the Times and the rest of corporate media who simply accepted yet another lame excuse for disgusting behavior.

Ben Kesling wrote in Columbia Journalism Review: that it came off  “like a bureaucratic mix-up or some tedious violation of protocol, not a deeply disrespectful moral failure, which it surely was. The sacred had been profaned.”

And though I fault a desperate candidate and his winged monkeys, I can’t let the press off the hook. There is simply no excuse after all these years to continue to normalize this guy. I was recently in the UK, where one of my traveling companions said he was asked by two elderly Scottish women what exactly is the matter with us. Are we not, they wondered, able to see what that man is, or how he does nothing for anyone other than himself. An elderly Scot, thousands of miles from our shores, had a better bead on him than our mainstream news organizations that continue to “sane-wash” him, bending over backwards to make his antics seem like nothing out of the ordinary.

WORKING THE REFS

This epidemic of false equivalence didn’t begin with our ex-president. And it’s not just our legacy media, the new digital media, of which social media is a part, has hastened the demise of balance. Fearing the potential harm a vengeful autocrat might do to them, Facebook is groveling at the feet of the right-wing. Driven exclusively by profit and not accuracy or fairness, they have recanted and apologized for honestly covering the 2020 presidential race.

Another point of balance for newsrooms is the abortion debate. The empirical data, unchanging over many decades, is that 65-81% of Americans want women to control their own bodies, yet the media employs both-sides-isms to falsely imply that it’s a close call. This is the essence of false equivalence.

And from the Future-Is-Now file, Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens and now, Nexus, says we must ban bots from social media: “If tech giants and libertarians complain that such measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that freedom of speech is a human right that should be reserved for humans, not bots."

©2024 Jon Sinton