‘Suicide for democracy.’ What is ‘bothsidesism’ – and how is it different from journalistic objectivity?
- Written by Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne
“Bothsidesism” is a term of disparagement against a form of journalism that presents “both sides” of an issue without any regard for their relative evidentiary merits.
The term has been used to describe media reporting on Donald Trump and in relation to coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. For some, mentioning Israel’s ongoing occupation of Gaza in the context of last year’s October 7 terror attacks by Hamas will be a form of bothsidesism.
Yale history professor Timothy Snyder has described bothsideism as “suicide for democracy”.
If journalists just say “there are two sides to everything and I am going to find my way into the middle”, he said earlier this year in relation to reporting on Trump’s rallies, “you are always going to give the people who want to overthrow the system an advantage” because you are sharing your legitimacy with theirs.
This week, former publisher Louise Adler criticised the lack of attention paid, on the anniversary of the October 7 attacks, to their consequences for Palestinians, but clarified she wasn’t calling “for bothsidesism”. She continued, quoting writer Jacqueline Rose: “balance is a corrupt term in an unbalanced world”.
Balance, properly understood, is not a corrupt term, but what Adler is alluding to is a well-deserved critique of a kind of reporting that perverts the concept of impartiality. This journalistic quality has become crucial in today’s hyper-partisan political atmosphere. However, far from being an element in impartiality, “bothsidesism” undermines it.
Equal consideration, not treatment
Impartiality does an indispensable service to democracy, whereas bothsidesism does a serious disservice, allowing for the ventilation of lies, hate speech and conspiracy theories, on the spurious ground they represent another, equally valid, side of the story.
Reporting both sides of an issue is a basic requirement of journalism – but this doesn’t mean giving both sides equal weight, regardless of the facts. It requires giving each side equal consideration by reference to the available facts, but not necessarily equal treatment.
Bothsidesism can also be used as an excuse for giving wrongdoers a public relations platform. Some years ago, a Sydney newspaper gave notorious Sydney criminal George Freeman an extensive interview, during which he extolled his virtues, on the basis it was giving him a chance to tell his side of the story. But there was only one side of the Freeman story that mattered to the public: he was a criminal.
Impartiality, or objectivity as some prefer to call it, has been central to the ethical and idealistic norms of journalism from its earliest days. By the middle of the 19th century, impartiality in reporting had become a well established norm. It required, among other things, the separation of opinion from the reporting of news.
It was given what is perhaps its most ringing endorsement by C.P. Scott, first editor, then owner-editor of the Manchester Guardian, when in an essay to mark the newspaper’s centenary, he wrote, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”.
Just the facts
However, by the 1940s, journalism had become so debased by proprietorial propaganda and commercial ambition that senior figures in the American media became alarmed at the decline in public trust in the press as an institution. Their response was to establish – and pay for – a Commission on the Freedom of the Press.
The resulting report, published in 1947, profoundly influenced the practice of journalism in many Western countries, including Australia. A central tenet of this new approach was not just that opinion should be separated from news, but that the news itself would consist only of factual accounts of events, utterances and causes.
It was a noble aim, but it bred a sterile form of reporting more akin to stenography than journalism. News stories became bereft of explanation or evaluation of the factual content, leaving it to the audience to join the dots, figure out the context and make sense of what they were being told.
Over time, a more analytical style of reporting evolved, which went beyond a strict recitation of facts to include evaluation.
Yet many media platforms remain wedded to the idea that if someone pokes their head up and wishes to comment on an issue, it is included if there is news value in what that person has to say, on the basis it represents “another side of the story”. The evaluative element goes missing.
Climate change deniers and tobacco
So it was that for decades the tobacco industry was able to assert – in the face of strong medical evidence – that the link between smoking and cancer was not conclusively proved.
The same tactic is now being used by climate-change deniers, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real and is caused by human activity.
In cases like this, bothsidesism does immense damage to democratic discourse: it creates a false equivalence between two sides, where the weight of evidence is clearly on one side and not the other.
Climate change deniers are using the tactics of Big Tobacco, though the weight of evidence is clearly on one side.
Mike Stewart/AAP
Impartiality, by contrast, does not permit such intellectual dysfunction.
Impartiality has six components: accuracy, fairness, balance, openmindedness, integrity and fidelity to news values. They are all important. But the one that distinguishes impartiality from bothsidesism most clearly is balance.
Balance follows the weight of evidence. It forms part of the evaluative and explanatory functions of impartial news reporting. It provides the basis for a reporter to choose which evidence to give the most prominence. It also informs their choices for the language they’ll use to distinguish between stronger and weaker evidence, and to present the facts underpinning these evaluations.
And on language, there is no need for impartial reporting to be timid: a lie is a lie and a liar is a liar, where there is observable evidence that this is so.
But what about cases where any contest over evidence is drowned out by the force of political rhetoric?
Donald Trump and the media’s duty
A vivid example from the current US presidential election came from last month’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Trump was fact-checked and corrected in real time by the host broadcaster, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), after telling lies about abortion, immigration and the result of the 2020 election.
Harris was not fact-checked during the debate.
Why were the two candidates treated differently? Because of the established facts on which such editorial judgments are made. CNN later reported that Trump made at least 33 false claims during the debate, compared with one from Harris.
Trump is an inveterate liar. The Washington Post recorded 30,573 lies told by him during the four years of his presidency, and he falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Donald Trump was fact-checked during last month’s debate when Harris was not because he’s a proven liar.
Alex Brandon/AAP
Then, during the debate, he claimed that immigrants were eating family pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio: something so outlandish that leaving it unchecked would have been irresponsible.
Harris, by contrast, has no remotely equivalent history of lying. So treating her as if she did would have been to seriously distort the facts.
Another Trumpian example is his claim that his convictions for falsifying financial records to cover up a sex scandal was the result of a political show-trial conducted by a judge who was “a certified Trump-hater”.
He also warned that he was “not sure the public would stand for it” if he was imprisoned, adding, “at a certain point there’s a breaking point”. He did not elaborate, but left the threat hanging in the air.
It is the duty of the impartial reporter to point this out. It is also their duty to make clear that these veiled threats are similar to those he made about the 2020 election having been stolen, which preceded the insurrection in Washington on January 6 2021. These are facts, based on observable evidence.
To not publish veiled threats to public order by a presumptive presidential candidate in an election year is to rob the public of information they need to have about the candidate.
Yet, to simply report Trump’s latest threats alongside statements of condemnation from others would be an egregious example of bothsidesism.
Abandoning impartiality because of a mistaken conflation with bothsidesism would only worsen the hyper-partisanship that is eroding the democratic consensus.
It would also mean giving up on an ideal which is essential for a functioning democracy to pursue. Walter Lippmann, the 20th-century American political prophet and sage, writing a hundred years ago at a time of similarly great social and political tumult, stated:
There is room, and there is need, for disinterested reporting … While the reporter will serve no cause, he will possess a steady sense that the chief purpose of “news” is to enable mankind to live successfully towards the future.
Authors: Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne
Daily Bulletin
