A job well done


I am currently reading a biography of Benjamin Franklin, the brother of the first man to start a newspaper in what is now the United States, and a perhaps the founder of the first media conglomerate in the country.

Ben had this to say about the job of the journalist:

Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

One must wonder if the venerable deist would maintain that position if he had a chance to observe today's media, which has internalized this maxim to an extent that the very practical BF would have found amazing. He was not the sort of man that suffered fools gladly, so it is hard to believe he would have given space to someone who believed, for instance, that one and one did not make two. For some questions, two sides is simply one side too many, and giving the demonstrably false equal status with the demonstrable truth (as inconvenient as that truth might be) simply advances the cause of error. (This is not the time or the place to get sidetracked with a discussion of how it would have been nice had the press followed Ben's maxim in the run up to war).

I have condemned the tendency of our media to play a story as if both sides of every "controversy" are entitled to equal consideration, without pointing out that one side is demonstrably and clearly wrong. Fairness therefore compels me to salute one Blaine Harden of the Washington Post, for not falling into this equivalency trap. His article Global-Warming Film Sparks Ire, (re-printed in this morning's Courant) tells the story of a fundamentalist yahoo in Federal Way, Washington who objected to his daughter being exposed to Al Gore's movie. His fellow yahoos on the school board banned the movie, but relented after being bombarded with emails, calls and letters. They used the standard dodge: they weren't banning the movie, they just wanted to make sure the kiddies were exposed to both sides of the controversy:

What the school board had intended to do, Larson and school board members insisted, was not to stop schools from teaching the science of global warming, but merely to follow long-standing school board rules that require students to be exposed to "other perspectives" when they view a film like "An Inconvenient Truth."

"We do not need to lose balance in order to save the Earth," Larson said.

But Harden was having none of it:

Exactly what "balance" might amount to, however, was not spelled out.

The National Academy of Sciences, together with nearly all of the world's leading climate experts, have agreed that there is conclusive evidence that human activity is causing the Earth to warm and that there is an urgent need to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the air.

Give that man a Pulitzer.
Posted: Friday - January 26, 2007 at 09:35 PM          

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