Being balanced is not being fair

The WashPost's Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote an amazing opinion piece about how false "fair and balanced" coverage is a disservice to the audience of the media and the audience of the journalist.  This is particularly applicable to the climate change discussion.

Here is some of what she wrote:
The distorting reality of false balance in the media

"Earlier this month, the BBC’s governing body issued a report assessing the BBC’s impartiality in covering scientific topics. When it comes to an issue like climate change, the report concluded, not all viewpoints share the same amount of scientific substance. Giving equal time and weight to a wide range of arguments without regard to their credibility risks creating a “false balance” in the public debate."

...

"As political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein have written, “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” And this isn’t just true when it comes to science coverage — the media has a similar tendency to issue unfiltered “he said, she said” accounts of political issues. The result is that every controversy seems to be reduced to a binary debate between two equal sides. In 2013, when congressional Republicans shut down the government over a health-care law that had been passed in Congress and upheld in the Supreme Court, many in the media continued to pretend that both sides were equally at fault.

...

"Gallup’s 2014 poll on the environment found that 42 percent of Americans believe that “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the news.” Blinded by the veil of false equivalence, we believe global warming is happening, but that it won’t seriously affect us. As a result, we are not holding our elected leaders accountable for acting to curb the threat of climate change, which only grows more dangerous over time."

So - don't believe that there is significant doubt about what's happening to the climate.  The scientists know -- and they are very, very worried.