[attention conservation notice: this one’s long and requires some offsite reading]

As I’m fascinated this week by how partisan rhetoric becomes increasingly polarized and unable to find common ground, here’s an interesting piece (tying into the same themes) on how a fear of accusations of “bias” and lip service to the great journalism god “balance” ends up muddying issues more than clarifying them:

On May 22, 2003, the Los Angeles Times printed a front-page story by Scott Gold, its respected Houston bureau chief, about the passage of a law in Texas requiring abortion doctors to warn women that the procedure might cause breast cancer. Virtually no mainstream scientist believes that the so-called ABC link actually exists – only anti-abortion activists do. Accordingly, Gold’s article noted right off the bat that the American Cancer Society discounts the “alleged link” and that anti-abortionists have pushed for “so-called counseling” laws only after failing in their attempts to have abortion banned. Gold also reported that the National Cancer Institute had convened “more than a hundred of the world’s experts” to assess the ABC theory, which they rejected. In comparison to these scientists, Gold noted, the author of the Texas counseling bill – who called the ABC issue “still disputed” – had “a professional background in property management.”

…But what happened next illustrates one reason journalists have such a hard time calling it like they see it on science issues. In an internal memo exposed by the Web site LAobserved.com, the Times’s editor, John Carroll, singled out Gold’s story for harsh criticism, claiming it vindicated critics who accuse the paper of liberal bias. Carroll specifically criticized Gold’s “so-called counseling” line (“a phrase that is loaded with derision”) and his “professional background in property management” quip (“seldom will you read a cheaper shot than this”). “The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discounted among researchers,” Carroll wrote, “but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it . . . . Apparently the scientific argument for the anti-abortion side is so absurd that we don’t need to waste our readers’ time with it.“

In a similar vein, see also the now-infamous Mark Halperin/ABC memo on the relative merits (or lack thereof) of campaign rhetorical distortions that caused Matt Drudge to pee himself over the thought of the press’s anti-Bush bias.

And apparently today’s the day to talk about groupthink and anti-intellectual bias. Here’s a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education about college academia’s trend toward liberalism and how it becomes the very thing it fears: close-minded and reactionary.

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.

The Common Assumption usually pans out and passes unnoticed — except for those who don’t share it, to whom it is an overt fact of professional life. Yet usually even they remain quiet in the face of the Common Assumption. There is no joy in breaking up fellow feeling, and the awkward pause that accompanies the moment when someone comes out of the conservative closet marks a quarantine that only the institutionally secure are willing to endure.

Are “balance” and “bias” even useful terms anymore? I had a discussion with a friend last week about the apparent “bias” of the “mainstream media” (and oh how I hate that particular term, which seems to have become some pejorative description of news organizations once perceived as the gold standard of news delivery), in which I was arguing that any particular bias was in the eye of the beholder, and that the beholder’s eye was particularly colored with partisan feeling. But now I’m not so sure. I’ve been known on occasion to rail against Fox’s… let’s say more conservative tendencies — how is that necessarily any different than someone who claims CBS is the home of the lefty? Or, for that matter, “Hollywood” (which, last time I checked, was just about as evenly politically split as the rest of the country)? Do we perceive bias because it’s there, or because the information presented doesn’t jibe with our viewpoints — or “reality” or “the facts”, depending on which side of the argument you’re on?

Here’s another: since we put a lot of things down to “being a black or white issue”, is it possible to have “balance” when discussing that issue? After all, if one side’s right, then one side’s wrong, and there isn’t any gray area between them. And even if there is a gray area (or, as in the abortion-leads-to-breast-cancer story above, where that gray area isn’t even really that gray), how incumbent is it on those discussing the issue to point out both sides and discuss them as if they were rational theories? I mean, I can probably find some guy to argue that the earth really doesn’t orbit the sun, and maybe he’s got some kind of evidence to back that up, but at the end of the day, is it worth even reporting his arguments? Does a reliance on relativism (for either side of the argument) mean that anyone with a tinfoil hat and a crackpot theory gets presented merely as “an opposing viewpoint“?

I think I need a nap.