A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight. — Proverbs 11:1
From Wikipedia: False balance, also known as false compromise or argument to moderation, or argumentum ad temperantiam - a logical fallacy which asserts that given two positions there exists a compromise between them which must be correct.
Also from Wikipedia: "Today, false balance is used to describe a perceived or real media bias, where journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence actually supports."
Hat tip to Dr. Harris Steinman from CAMCheck for drawing my attention to the excellent editorial, When balance is bias, in the British Medical Journal. The full text is behind a paywall, but can be read in CAMCheck.
What more is there to say? Political correctness and fear of being accused of bias often make cowards of us all. In many debates there is only one logical, or scientifically viable, position. To pretend otherwise in order to appease the illogical or scientifically nonsensical side of the debate, is disingenuous.
Examples include the anthropomorphic global warming debate, the vaccination debate and the evolution debate.
Wikipedia seems to have a handle on the issue of managing the appropriate balance. Dave Snowden in Cognitive Edge points out that Wikipedia requires a balance of reliable sources, not a balance of political perspectives. Hat tip to Snowden for a good book relating to this issue, Farhad Manjoo's True enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.
* Image of no-go scale from The Gleaming Retort.
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