News Outlets Needs to Stop their False Neutrality
When one side is objectively wrong, they should be presented as such.
Have you ever seen some news outlet or another reporting on something like global climate change or vaccine efficacy while using a bunch of weasel words and hedging when it comes to their reporting? You know, premises that have overwhelming evidence to support them?
Worse yet, have you ever seen some news station setting up a debate between a doctor and a vaccine denier, or a climate change scientist and a climate change-denying politician, with the notion of having a debate on the merits of those topics? As though both positions somehow have equal weight behind them?
This needs to stop.
It is problematic for many reasons, not least of which is that, in the pursuit of neutrality, these outlets are giving weight to views that are objectively false. There is overwhelming evidence to support man-made climate change, and trying to frame climate change denial as an equal and opposite view is dishonest at best and dangerous at worst. Same for vaccine efficacy and countless other topics.
We have reached this weird point in mainstream news where nobody trusts it anymore. Whether you’re a right-wing nutjob who only watches InfoWars and One America News (since Fox News is “too liberal” these days) or a left-winger who gets all of their news from Occupy Democrats and The Young Turks, a lot of the outlets that used to be considered “mainstream” are now considered untrustworthy.
(Fun fact: I had to go through the Media Bias Chart to find something on the liberal end that enough people would know so this bit would work. The fact that the reliability score for Occupy Democrats is nearly four times that of Alex Jones’s show should say something. The whole chart is fascinating, though.)
This whole thing has been coming to a head in the past few days with NBC deciding to hire Ronna McDaniel, the ex-chair of the RNC. This has caused significant backlash, both externally and within NBC itself, as several hosts have not hesitated to make their displeasure heard on live air.
Do I understand the reasoning behind hiring McDaniel? On the surface, sure — it was intended to offer a view of the “other side” of things, i.e. a (now former) insider to the MAGA movement and Trumpism. She was recently ousted in her position at the RNC because Trump didn’t see her as sufficiently loyal, and she recently said that Biden won the election “fair and square” and called January 6 “unacceptable.”
That said, she was also recorded on a phone call between Donald Trump and Michigan canvassers telling them to not certify the election, saying “Do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.” She deflected the actual truth — that Biden won a free and fair election — and served as a mouthpiece for Trump for years as the head of the RNC, spreading lies and attacking the press.
I think making a name for yourself by spreading falsehoods and attacking news outlets who attempt to report on those falsehoods should probably be a disqualifying factor for working for one of those news outlets. I mean, unless it’s Fox News, which is more than happy to also spread falsehoods, anyway.
Coming clean several years after the fact, mere months out from getting fired by her former boss for not being a loyal enough liar, isn’t good enough to undo all of the damage that she caused. Her credibility is, at best, incredibly damaged, and giving her a platform as a contributor seems both ethically wrong and just generally gross.
Man-made climate change exists, vaccines work and don’t cause autism, and Biden won the election. These things are provable with evidence and scientific rigor, and platforming people who say otherwise is disingenuous. I feel like a journalist’s job is to report the truth, and these things are the truth.
Reporting the truth does not mean giving airtime to whackos who insist on spreading misinformation, disinformation, and straight-up lies. It doesn’t mean humoring people who attack the press and try to discredit legitimate reporting with “alternative facts.” It means calling a spade a spade and using the press to tell the truth and shut down the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Look, I’m not a journalist — I’m just some weirdo with a blog who likely gets plenty of things wrong in what are ultimately opinion pieces. I have plenty of clear and apparent bias in my work, and while I try to do research, I fall victim to confirmation bias like everyone else.
That said, I just hate that we live in a time where millions of people in America, ostensibly the greatest country in the world, believe anything a racist, bigoted con-man says, no matter how much of a baldly apparent lie those things might be. These are people, many of whom are perfectly smart, reasonable people, who nonetheless are willing to believe things that are provably false for reasons completely beyond my comprehension.
And I hate that otherwise credible news sources are willing to give a platform to these people in the name of “equal time.” The modern Republican party — at least, most of them — are hellbent on literally destroying democracy, and I feel like we need to call that out more. From Project 2025 to Project REDMAP, they have been telegraphing their intent for decades, and it has been a proclivity to fight dirty whenever possible.
Are there whackjobs on the left spreading disinformation and lies? Of course. They don’t deserve a platform either. Big news outlets giving a platform to anyone who wants to spread lies is giving them an air of legitimacy, which is a practice that needs to stop.
Democracy is literally on the line this year, and the ballot box will be the deciding factor in this one. We cannot allow election deniers and pro-January 6 idiots to continue spreading lies and disinformation, and we can prevent it by refusing them a platform.
One entire political party has decided that they deserve absolute power, and the free press should be the first bastion of defense against that. They shouldn’t be enabling it to move forward. Let’s stop this nonsense now.
Be well out there.
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