Why We Need Press Objectivity, Not Balance

When the news is "balanced" in an unbalanced world, it becomes an instrument of deception. This has made producing the news extremely difficult in an era of mass delusions and hyper-polarization.

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The media is biased. So goes the refrain, anyway. The evidence: yet another article about Donald Trump’s 91 felony indictments, or calling him a liar, or pointing out that he was found liable for sexual assault, or mentioning that he can’t legally do business in New York. Each is an objective, cold, hard fact.

Now, a recent viral article in The Free Press zeroed in on an insider account of an alleged shift at National Public Radio, one of the most widely listened to American news radio stations. It’s an insider exposé of supposedly sinister media bias.

The longtime NPR staffer argues that the outlet has gone woke, jettisoning its journalistic mandate and—I’m paraphrasing here—catering only to white, progressive liberals who drive Priuses with bumper stickers that say “my other car is a bicycle” and carry fresh produce in their tote bags (filled with yoga mats), sipping kombucha while reading How to Be an Antiracist. (Similar accusations crop up everywhere in polarized democracies these days, but the US is hyper-polarized, so it’s more acute).

I’m not an NPR insider, so I have no idea whether some, or any, or most of the portrayal is accurate or warranted (though I will say that critiquing the press is healthy, even if a lot of the core examples used in the piece don’t hold up to scrutiny).

Instead, I’d like to focus on two specific claims made in the article, which are presented as clear-cut evidence that NPR has lost its way—and which echo arguments that are regularly trotted out by conservatives as evidence of left-wing media bias in modern American politics:

1. The number of self-proclaimed Republicans who listen to NPR has plummeted and its listener base is now mostly from the left-wing of the political spectrum. (This is true).

2. The number of people in the newsroom who are bona fide Trump supporters is zero, which is a crisis of “viewpoint diversity” that must be urgently fixed.¹

Both of these claims are indicative of a genuine dilemma that is creating a crisis in news production and perceptions of bias.

But when they are used as an attack against a press outlet in the Trump era, both represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s going on in American media—and how journalists and the press more broadly should behave in an era of hyper-polarization, where the distribution of truth and lies are not equally balanced between political parties.

How are news outlets supposed to behave when members of one party are required to regularly lie on behalf of their leader—and that leader is an authoritarian demagogue?

The standard media debate completely misses the point.

Let’s start with a thought experiment.

Imagine that we discover a new land—we’ll call it The Republic of Truthistan. In this imaginary world, nobody can lie.

As a result, every statement made by a politician is an objectively verifiable fact, though there are disagreements about what should happen next. The political discussion is never about what’s true or false—it’s always true, after all—so debates are only about the way society should change for the better. In Truthistan, there’s still partisanship, because nobody knows what the future might hold and the political parties hold divergent values. But crucially, there is one value on which everyone agrees: democracy must be protected.

What would the press look like in Truthistan? Well, it should be rather like a mirror of society, both in the viewpoint diversity of journalists who produce the news and in the perspectives it covers. It should be balanced, giving equal airtime to the two political parties vying for power in Truthistan. If it veers from this balance, or starts to employ more people from one political party than the other, it would be journalistic malpractice. It would be evidence of real media bias.

Now, it turns out that Truthistan has an enemy. Across the sea, you will find its geopolitical nemesis: The Kingdom of Lies. Here, there are also two political parties, but lying is rampant.

Politicians in both parties distort the truth. However, one party lies much more than the other. In fact, in order to become a card-carrying member of that party, you must publicly declare your belief in something that is verifiably false. That declaration of the lie functions as a loyalty test. Anybody who does not prostrate themselves before that lie is purged from the party, or becomes a political pariah within it.

Moreover, while both parties of Truthistan agree that democracy is sacrosanct, the political system itself has come up for debate in The Kingdom of Lies, such that one party wants to hand over authoritarian power to its leader, while the other party hopes to maintain its deeply flawed, but broadly democratic, system of governance.

The press in The Kingdom of Lies has a problem.

In order to function, the press needs democracy. Without a democratic system of governance, the value of journalism is obliterated. It becomes a propaganda wing of the government, eliminating its check on power and its role in informing the citizenry. Moreover, the leader of one of the political parties is openly inciting violence against journalists, who credibly fear for their safety. Making matters worse, the party that wants to undercut democracy and make journalism impossible is the same party that lies with much greater frequency.

What are the journalists in The Kingdom to do? They have two main options:

1. Give equal, balanced airtime and coverage to both parties and ensure that their newsroom is populated by an equal number of journalists who are members of both parties.

2. Let truth and objectivity guide coverage, such that lies are not amplified, even if it means that airtime becomes skewed toward the more truthful party. Only employ journalists who are relentless about their commitment to the truth, even if that means that the dishonest party’s supporters disappear from the newsroom. And asymmetrically criticize the authoritarian party specifically about their autocratic machinations, since the press in The Kingdom has a pro-democracy bias.

It will have occurred to you, discerning reader that you are, that Truthistan does not and will never exist; that The Kingdom of Lies represents the United States in the Trump and post-Trump era; and that I consider Option 2 to be the correct, but still problematic, answer to the puzzle posed above.

The critique of NPR imagines that we live in Truthistan. In a perfect world, we would live in Truthistan, but we don’t. So, let’s stop the make-believe and confront the cold, hard reality of lies. Politicians in the Democratic party—like all politicians literally everywhere—sometimes distort the facts, mislead voters, and, yes, lie. But there are major differences between the Democratic party and the Trump-led Republicans that are salient for how media organizations should treat them. As you might guess from my thinly veiled thought experiment, those differences are:

• A central tenet of the Trumpified Republican Party is “The Big Lie”: the false belief that Trump secretly won the “rigged” 2020 election. (Nope! Not even close. I co-wrote a book called How to Rig an Election, so I assure you I know a thing or two about actual election rigging).

• The Republican Party has become an authoritarian political movement. This is not only true of some weirdo fringe within the party. Rather, its political core is committed to objectively anti-democracy scheming. (This is not just about January 6th either, though it is both true and terrifying that 65 percent of the elected Republicans in the US House voted to overturn the 2020 election even after the mob had stormed the Capitol).

Now, the appropriate analogue for the first point is how the press deals with climate change deniers. We know that climate change is real. It’s objective, scientific fact that it is happening, even as there are legitimate debates about the severity of the problem and what to do about it. The press has broadly learned how to handle this: most responsible outlets do not put weirdos and cranks and climate change deniers opposite scientists to give “both sides” to a balanced debate. Instead, they have recognized a crucial lesson—and allowed it to dictate their journalistic choices:

The lesson is this: When reality is asymmetric, balanced reporting is deception.

Somehow, though, this all flies out the window when partisanship is involved instead of science. If someone says the sky is green and another person says it’s blue, you shouldn’t have a blue/green panel on the Sunday shows. But when it comes to election denialism, the media is accused of “left-wing bias” if it doesn’t give equal platforms to authoritarian election deniers who live in a fantasy world and parrot Trumpian lies. That’s ridiculous.

The press should have precisely two biases: pro-truth and pro-democracy.²

Everything should be guided by those two principles and, whenever possible beyond those two biases, there should be no further partisan or demographic slant. If we’re in Truthistan where truth is universal and democracy unchallenged, then yes, the news should broadly reflect the viewpoints and backgrounds of society.

However, if partisanship overlaps with lopsided enthusiasm for lies and authoritarianism, well, then you’ve got a problem about the perception of news production, rather than actually being guilty of illegitimate media behavior.

I’ll reiterate my strong view that, if anything, the media currently has a pro-Trump bias because of what I’ve previously highlighted as the banality of crazy. Bias isn’t about whether someone has better or worse coverage, but rather answering the question: if someone else did the same thing, would they be treated identically?

I can assure you that if, tomorrow, Biden were indicted for 91 felony charges; was found liable for sexual assault; tried to overturn an election by inciting an angry mob; suggested a general should be executed, called to shoot shoplifters without a trial; got banned from doing business in New York after being found to have committed fraud; and instructed his subordinates to find him 11,000 votes so he could win an election…the coverage would be far more savage and far more wall-to-wall than it is with Trump).

However, there is a real problem that was highlighted by the anti-NPR exposé.³ This is where the debate should lie.

It raises the following question, which is extremely serious for the fate of American democracy—and it’s much broader than the attack on NPR:

What happens when the normal press gets tuned out by half the country because attempts at objectivity and pro-democracy coverage produces a perceived partisan bias?

That is happening right now in the United States and elsewhere. It’s leading to horrifically destructive information bubbles and news sorting, in which the “mainstream media” becomes synonymous in the minds of millions with “anti-Trump.”

It may be true that the motivation is legitimate—objective, pro-democracy coverage must often be anti-Trump because he is an authoritarian liar. But that doesn’t negate the toxicity of that dynamic for the broader health of democracy.

And it yields an awful Catch-22.

Pursuing “balance” requires lying about reality with the slim possibility of restoring trust and attracting back some lost audiences. Pursuing “objectivity” means truthfully catering to a smaller Prius-driving slice of the electorate, while everyone else goes further down the rabbit hole into media that deliberately lies to them, from Newsmax to crazy Substacks written by delusional right-wing grifters.

Both approaches have significant downsides.

However, I know which camp I’m in: the press has a responsibility to truth and democracy and that responsibility overrides worries about its perception.

In the long run, though, if we don’t cure the underlying malaise—the social drivers that are leading people to believe grifting authoritarian liars and podcasters and random internet cranks on TikTok or Twitter or YouTube instead of fact-checked news sources—then we will be faced with the prospect of a democratic press that just shouts objective facts into the delusional authoritarian wind.

Thanks for reading The Garden of Forking Paths—and for supporting my work. This article was only for paid subscribers, so thank you for making my work possible. I sincerely appreciate it.

1. This is another one of the dubious claims in the article. How does he know? Lots of the voter registration data is private. It would be expensive to get access to the voter files, particularly because the newsroom in DC will have people who vote in many jurisdictions. And at least one reporter in that newsroom has already challenged the depiction, saying that the piece is incorrect.

2. If there were to be a third/fourth bias, it would be toward arguments that are made respectfully and in good faith, but the two above are the most important.

3. There are also some demographic skews in newsrooms that are unrelated to truth or democracy. And there are viewpoint skews in newsrooms that are unrelated to truth or democracy. These are real problems and should be treated as such. The press is imperfect and it’s not anti-press to push it to be better, given that it’s a pillar of civic health and democratic quality.