[OSM-talk] weeklyOSM #382 2017-11-07-2017-11-13

[Rory McCann]

On 17/11/17 23:04, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> On 11/17/2017 07:34 PM, Andy Townsend wrote:
>> Also, there is such a thing as "fake balance".  Imagine you're 
>> running an article about someone who's discussing ways to offset 
>> the problems caused by the Mercator projection; you don't then need
>> to also quote someone from the Flat Earth Society for the sake of
>> impartiality.
> 
> This is actually quite important. In the US, after the election, I 
> read a lot of media critique where people said that many papers had 
> misunderstood their journalistic impartiality as having to give both 
> sides of an argument equal coverage, however nonsensical one side may
> have been. This mistake that was made by well-meaning, 
> liberal-thinking, fairness-aspiring journalists, it was claimed, 
> contributed to giving the country Trump.

I second this. Irish broadcast law requires that political discussions
are "balanced", which was horrible during the 2015 same-sex marriage
debate. It was used to require that any mention of LGBTQ people on TV
was also "balanced" be equal airtime for people to respectfully claim
that gay people are a threat to children¹.

Requiring "balanced" discussions is fundamentally incompatible with any
sort of code of conduct.

Panti's Noble Call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXayhUzWnl0 :
> Have any of you ever come home in the evening and turned on the
> television and there is a panel of people - nice people, respectable
> people, smart people, the kind of people who make good neighbourly
> neighbours and write for newspapers. And they are having a reasoned
> debate about you. About what kind of a person you are, about whether you
> are capable of being a good parent, about whether you want to destroy
> marriage, about whether you are safe around children, about whether God
> herself thinks you are an abomination, about whether in fact you are
> "intrinsically disordered". And even the nice TV presenter lady who you
> feel like you know thinks it's perfectly ok that they are all having
> this reasonable debate about who you are and what rights you "deserve".
> 
> And that feels oppressive.

Calls for "balance" are often only made in one direction. Does anyone
believe that any mention of a company is required to give equal space to
someone to (respectfully, reasonably) claim that privately owned
companies are a threat to society, to the planet, are evil, and must be
fought, and must not be trusted? Surely people people should be
impartial on the capitalism/communism debate!

-- 
Rory

[1]
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/bai-rejects-charge-of-stifling-debate-on-gay-marriage-301581.html