How journalists traded truth for balance — and gave us this mess

“Fair and balanced.”

That Fox News slogan sounded so good at the time, but it was a Trojan horse for toxic opinion to take the place of truth.

I watched it happen. As a journalist in the early 2000s, I took part of it to some extent. I didn’t notice it at first, but as time went on, the signs became more apparent.

Through the 1990s, newspapers and network newscasts had a virtual monopoly on the American media market. This might sound like a bad thing, but in this case, it wasn’t. It immunized these few news platforms from the effects of market forces. Most towns had just one newspaper, and if you moved from CBS to NBC, the Evening News and Nightly News still told you the same story.

You didn’t choose what you watched based on the narrative, but on personality — whether you liked Mike Wallace or Tom Brokaw better.

Political parties told the same story, too. You didn’t choose your party based on its narrative, but based on its response to a common narrative we call “the truth.” Republicans and Democrats may have had different ways of dealing with this narrative — hawks disagreed with doves, and Reagan supply-siders debated the heirs of the New Deal — but they agreed on the basic facts.

Media meltdown

This held true all the way up to the 2000s, when the people who covered those political parties started to panic.

As the media began to fragment thanks to talk radio, cable news, and the internet, the mainstream media found themselves losing market share — and ad revenue. Newspaper circulations started to decline, and instead of tuning out Brokaw for Rather, then switching back again, viewers were jumping ship for Fox or CNN, and were staying there. Not because they liked the on-air personalities, but because, increasingly, they were reporting different versions of the facts.

In a desperate attempt to retain their audience, newspapers and broadcast networks changed their mission. Instead of simply reporting the facts, they started interviewing spin doctors on both sides of the political fence.

In short, they replaced devotion to the truth with a quest for balance as their prime directive.

It wasn’t that that they abandoned the truth, but rather that they made it harder to identify by giving equal time to conspiracy theorists simply because readers believed them. Climate deniers shared the page and the screen with respected scientists. And by giving a platform to their lies, they allowed them to spread, in much the same way social media would enable the spread of QAnon and similar absurdities.     

Why would respected news outlets transmit messages they knew were false? In part, it stemmed from an authentic desire for balance, and in part, it was self-preservation: They wanted to retain audiences across the political spectrum in a futile push to keep them from defecting to partisan outlets. In part, too, it was defensiveness: an attempt to shield themselves from charges of bias (which, of course, came anyway).  

Combat politics

But there was another factor, too. Mainstream outlets also realized that combat politics, like combat sports, boosted their ratings. Shows like Crossfire and Hannity & Colmes showed just how well divisiveness sold, and Donald Trump took it to a whole different level. Meanwhile, social media inflamed things further, while at the same time cannibalizing the mainstream media’s market share even more.

Traditional news providers saw no alternative but to go all-in on the combat paradigm. Instead of running “dry” stories that emphasized the facts, they started playing up pieces that provoked a sense of outrage. Eventually, coverage of local government fell by the wayside, because declining budgets wouldn’t support it anymore, and because it wasn’t as “sexy” as what was happening in Washington.

Pretty soon, combat politics was all anyone wanted to hear about, and the bigger the contrast, the better.

To return to the analogy of combat sports, the most lucrative boxing event of all time wasn’t Holyfield-Tyson or Wilder-Fury. It was a ridiculous spectacle matching a boxer (Floyd Mayweather) against an MMA fighter (Conor McGregor) who’d never boxed in his life.

Separate truths

Political contrasts sell, too.

Back in the early 2000s, people were lamenting that the two major political parties were too similar. But instead of creating greater contrasts on how they dealt with the issues, the parties began to distinguish themselves from one another based on what they believed. Each developed its own spin on the truth and, eventually, its own separate truth. The tipping point came when Trump told tens of thousands of likes, while at the same time dismissing the facts as “fake news.”

Through it all, the mainstream media and social media maintained their commitment to balance first and foremost, in the name of free speech (ostensibly) and profits (actually). Meanwhile, they continued bleeding market share to outlets who had realized this was a losing proposition. Fox News, no longer fair nor balanced, gave voice to prime-time conspiracy mongers, while MSNBC and CNN injected more and more opinion into their own reporting.

It took an insurrection at the Capitol to persuade social media outlets, belatedly, that free speech was just an excuse for believers in Trump’s alternate reality to spew hate and lies. And that balance was as elusive as the Holy Grail.

By then, however, truth had been so badly fractured that it seemed like Humpty Dumpty, post-fall.

Journalists who had exchanged the truth for balance, then for outrage, helped to nudge him off his perch. The truth was always more important than either, but now that we may have finally realized it, all we can do is try to pick up the pieces... while white supremacists and other assorted conspiracy mongers laugh and stomp on them in the meantime.

Stephen H. Provost is a former newspaper staff writer, columnist, and editor, and the author of Media Meltdown in the Age of Trump, available on Amazon at www.amazon.com/dp/B08RC7L8X1.