Wikipedia on false balancing: False balance, known colloquially as bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a cause of misinformation.
False equivalence: A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency. Colloquially, a false equivalence is often called "comparing apples and oranges." This logic fallacy incorrectly presents two things as equivalent despite significant differences between them. Equivalence between two subjects is based on flawed reasoning, often oversimplifying or otherwise distorting complex issues by focusing on superficial similarities. False equivalence is not specific to journalism. It occurs in many types of arguments.
Both false balancing and false equivalence mislead by presenting unequal things as equal. Both are common tactics in misinformation campaigns.
Germaine chatting with the MSM?
(mainstream media)
A few days after the 2016 presidential election, Russian reporter Masha Gessen wrote this warning in an article, Autocracy: Rules for Survival, for the New York Review of Books:
“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to Trump].
Gessen watched and reported about Putin dismantling Russia's democracy and the building of his brutal kleptocratic tyranny. She could see the threat of the same thing happening to America even before DJT was elected to office.
Today, an NYT opinion-interview with Gessen included the following comments:
When you place lies and facts on an even footing, it basically creates a political sphere in which there’s no fact-based reality. That’s a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have [democratic] politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth. I think that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics. [authoritarian politics disregards reality and truth when they are inconvenient and sometimes even when they aren't]
We, as journalists, do our absolute worst when we engage in a kind of false evenhandedness. What I think their thinking was — and I can only conjecture — but their thinking was probably: We have one candidate who is in the habit of lying, as is his running mate. Let’s find a way that we can show that we’re equally critical of both candidates.
The idea that that is in any way comparable to the kinds of really malignant lies that Trump and Vance have been spreading intentionally [referring to Walz's false assertion that he was in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China]. There is no equality here.
Vance absolutely leaned into the Trump framing of Jan. 6 as, on the one hand, a peaceful protest, on the other hand, a question of freedom of speech, a reflection of fundamental American values. And this, as many people have noted, was when Walz finally seemed to find his footing, in the last 10 minutes of the debate. And I think this is another thing that was so disappointing to me.
It’s a classic false equivalence. Walz is talking about his time in Hong Kong and possibly fibbing, possibly misremembering, but it’s a minor, minor thing in his background. Versus Vance’s out-and-out lies about an actual insurrection and actual violent attack on our institutions of state. To put them on the same level is absurd.
So the debate was truly worse than I feared. If you think back to the presidential debate and how in the immediate aftermath everybody said that Kamala Harris won it, which she did, she was a better debater if you judge it as a debate. But if you judge it in terms of its influence and think about who dominated the news cycle afterward, well, it was clearly Donald Trump and his lies, and Vance’s lies about Springfield, Ohio.
Three thoughts:
- By virtue of his sloth and stupidity, DJT is no totalitarian like Stalin, Hitler or arguably Putin. Unless I grossly misread Hannah Arendt's 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, DJT can never be a totalitarian. But he is capable of being, and desperately wants to be, a cruel kleptocratic, above-the-law dictator for life.
- More importantly, Gessen correctly calls out the MSM's stubborn false equivalence habit that puts dark free speech by DJT, MAGA and the GOP on the same footing as people and institutions that support honest speech, democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law and truth, even if that support is sometimes uneven or contradicted. She calls out lies and points out the non-equivalence of authoritarian DJT/GOP/MSM lies compared to Waltz falsely saying he was in Hong Kong when he wasn't. It is not just the quantity of lies, e.g., lies/week, that is important. Just as or more important is the quality of those lies. Anti-democracy lies are far more damaging and thus important than merely self-aggrandizing lies coming from a politician who supports democracy.
- Gessen's assertion of false equivalence the MSM routinely asserts is similar to the false balancing criticism I have been asserting about the MSM falsely calling authoritarianism and authoritarians things like conservatism, conservatives or some variant thereof. Gessen's comments were so resonant with me that I got irrationally exuberant and wrote some comments about the opinion piece. I don't comment much anymore at the NYT because I irritated someone there. Now the NYT "moderates" my comments into irrelevance. For those interested, here's my comment, which is still in "moderation" by the NYT.
Eww, I've been
moderated upon!
Yeah, pending approval
my ass!
My comments pasted here: Fantastic interview. Gessen gets it. For months, I have been writing emails to journalists, editors and opinionologists, including those at the NYT, bitterly complaining about the false balancing malpractice the MSM keeps committing by treating Trump and MAGA on an equal footing.
My main complaint has been and still is is that it is false balancing for the MSM to call Trump, MAGA, Project 2025 and the like "conservative" when they are in fact authoritarian. Gessen knows authoritarianism when it exists. She warned us in 2016 just after Trump won the election that he was an autocrat. She was ignored or attacked as a liar, idiotically alarmist, etc.
What has the MSM response to Gessen and people like me been? In my case, The NYT now moderates my comments and refuses to post them until they are "moderated." I get moderated into oblivion for no reason I can fathom other than being too blunt about inconvenient truth. Apparently, I really ticked off somebody here. Not surprisingly, none of my emails about false balancing to the people here and elsewhere has elicited a single response.
Regarding false equivalence, Gessen is right. Under current circumstances, the MSM is so wrong it amounts to malpractice at best, but arguably betrayal of the public.
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