Balance as Bias

Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. (2004). Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press. Global Environmental Change, 14(2), 125-136.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2004

DOI

10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001

Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001

Cited from

philosophy

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Symmetric Response to Asymmetric State
  • Journalism — false balance. Giving climate science and industry-funded denial equal coverage, against an evidence asymmetry on the order of ninety-seven to three, produces a roughly even audience perception that distorts toward the under-supported side.

    This sourceThe journalistic norm of balance gave climate-change contrarians coverage out of proportion to the scientific evidence, contributing to a divergence of popular from scientific discourse — the canonical false-balance analysis.

Domain-specific

• Okrent's Law
  • The distortion is proportional to the underlying asymmetry: applying a 50/50 presentational frame to a 97/3 empirical dispute (as Boykoff and Boykoff documented for U.S. prestige-press climate coverage from 1988 to 2002)

Mechanisms

• Editorial or Deliberative Balance Rule
  • Its failure mode is false equivalence: the same rule, applied mechanically, becomes a machine for treating unsupported or harmful claims as equal to well-established ones, "balancing" evidence with its denial

    This sourceShows that mechanical balance can give unsupported denial claims treatment comparable to established evidence and thereby produce biased coverage.

Verification

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