Forget ‘both-sideism’ and report the truth

change without feeling bound to include those who insist it doesn’t exist. They are free to treat facts as factual.

Sadly, that notion would be resisted here. In the first place, climate change deniers would raise a squall. But journalists, addicted to conflict and confrontation and to a misguided idea of what it takes to be “fair and balanced,” would likely also be up in arms.

Never mind that neither fairness nor balance requires us to report discredited and disreputable information. Never mind, either, that winning the debate is not the point for climate change deniers anyway. No, they win simply by being included, thus wringing from us an implicit concession that they represent a point of view worth hearing. Even when they do not. As deniers of tragedies from the Holocaust to the Civil War to the Parkland, Fla., shooting prove, both-sideism isn’t just a journalistic problem. But it is in journalism that it is arguably most consequential. One recalls with a grimace how reporters treated Hillary Clinton’s sloppy handling of emails as an object of concern equivalent to the racism, misogyny, mendacity, ineptitude, ignorance and corruption that trail Trump like an odor. A survey by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center found that over the course of the full campaign, Clinton actually received more negative media coverage than he did. More. Two years later, most of us would likely agree there was no comparison between the two. Too bad more of us did not come to that conclusion back when it mattered. Yes, reporters should strive for impartiality. They should strive to be open-minded. But they should also strive to cover the world as fully and factually as they can.

The BBC seems to have reached a moment of, well, truth in that regard. American journalists would be well advised to emulate them. Tomorrow’s historians will record that we helped lead the country into this mess.