A Question of Balance at Susan Labandibar

A Question of Balance

It’s time for our news media to adopt a new standard for fairness in reporting. Current standards call for balance. This means that if the media reports a claim made by a partisan group, fairness dictates that they report the views of opposing groups. But how does this play out in a world where we are rolling pell-mell towards a collision with Mother Nature? Most people are having a tough time coming to grips with the idea that instead of creating a better world for our children we are despoiling our planet, leaving our descendants without the natural resources we enjoyed and with an unpredictable climate in which they will struggle to survive.

The news media has not served us well as we slowly turn to confront this crisis. Even after such hard-core sceptics as President Bush caved in to public pressure and began to acknowledge that climate change was real, many news sources were still trying to maintain a balanced reporting style on global warming. According to a study done in 2004 by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), over 50% of articles appearing in major newspapers, including the New York Times and The Washington Post, continued to present opposing views, even though the overwhelming scientific consensus was that human activity was contributing to global warming.

As more news emerged about the reality of climate change, many reporters felt it was necessary to counterbalance the gloomy news with phrases like: “Skeptics contend there is no evidence the warming exceeds the climate’s natural variations.” Today, I was listening to National Public Radio as they reported that a California judge had struck down the Navy’s waiver that allowed it to violate the Environmental Policy Act by conducting drills of high-intensity sonar off the California coastline. “Environmental groups assert that the sonar harms whales,” the announcer read.

This is yet another example of how balanced reporting misleads the public. It’s an indisputable reality that high-intensity sonar harms whales. Dead whales have been found with bleeding eardrums immediately after these sonar exercises. The Navy claims that the national interest outweighs the damage done to the marine mammals. So, why does NPR seek to make it seem that there is legitimate controversy over whether this technology is harmful to whales? It’s because the news media shrinks from reporting the real story, the obvious story that everyone knows: There are people who just don’t care about global warming, about nature, and about our future. Apparently, there is some unwritten journalistic rule that prevents the media from advancing this as a possible motivation, unless they are writing about someone whom they have already branded as evil–Slobodan Milosovic, for example.