Apportioning blame must be a fine balancing act

THERE is a wonderful debate raging across US media and social networks about what is referred to as the fallacy of false equivalence. It is an old debate that has flared up over the media’s coverage of the latest fiscal showdown between the Democrats and the Republicans.

What I am enjoying so much is that while the media cover the so-called “sequester” in apparently infinite detail, there is also a robust debate going on about how they cover it. That is not something we do a lot of here.

We are excoriated often, blamed for the failings of others, threatened with swingeing restrictions on our freedom and, fortunately, still bought in bundles.

But we don’t spend a lot of time analysing the trends, shortcomings and triumphs of our journalism – except, perhaps, through the race lens.

There is a growing number of media- related niche magazines, websites and blogs contributing to discussion about how we do our job, but it feels still like a largely insider debate.

Bizcommunity and Wag The Dog’s magazine, The Media, and its digital version, themediaonline, cover news about the industry. Gill Moodie’s Grubstreet and Anton Harber’s theharbinger are blogs that offer valuable analysis, but good media analysis is an emerging industry.

In case you haven’t been tracking it, the sequester is the automatic implementation of public spending cuts totalling around 85-billion (about R772-billion – nearly three quarters of the budget Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan announced last week, but less than 2% of US government spending this year) that are kicking in because the Democrats and Republicans cannot reach a long term agreement on how to manage their giant deficit down to a sustainable level.

False equivalence kicks in as the country’s largely politically aligned media try to implement our profession’s avowed culture of balance in their analysis of who is to blame.

Most of the analysis I read, which I suppose exposes a centrist bias, puts the blame on the Republicans because they have loudly and overtly insisted they will not accept any shift of the tax burden towards the wealthy.

Against that background, President Barack Obama has no room to move. He cannot negotiate if the other side says the only option is our option: Big spending cuts and no tax increase.

The false equivalence fallacy arises when the media try to present both sides of the argument as valid and reasonable and to come down in the middle – showing balance.

One commentator described it in a tweet picked up by The Atlantic like this: Democrats 1+1=2; Republicans 1+1=3; media 1+1=2.5.

Less graphically, a false equivalence fallacy occurs when a writer wrongly equates one action with another, saying they are equally egregious but without taking the factors that separate them into account.

An old example of false equivalence that has been dredged up again, is a Boston Herald report criticising president-elect Obama because the security services were building him a new, heavy, blast-proof and thirsty car while he had campaigned for energy efficiency. The two issues exist in separate worlds, but come down in the middle and Obama appears to be soft on his green credentials.

Another is an Associated Press report from 2004 saying that supporters of Democratic nominee John Kerry and of Republican candidate George W Bush were attacking the war records of their rivals.

“Republicans have accused Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, of fabricating events which led to his five medals. Democrats point to gaps in Bush’s stateside Air National Guard service in 1972 and 1973 to say Bush shirked his duty,” the report said.

That looked like balance, but the records released at the time fully supported Kerry and cast serious doubt on Bush’s case.

The available evidence for the two positions was far from equivalent, yet the report weighed them equally.

So, you get the picture. But what do we learn from it?

Balanced reporting is professionally and politically correct. It is the goal to which our Press Code commits us.

Moral relativism also is a very important value in our riven society. We all agree that rape and murder are wrong but, to cite a fairly simple example, South African communities do not agree in every respect on what constitutes cruelty to animals.

But surely we can begin to dispense with the obligatory nod to the ravages of apartheid when we analyse the progress we have made on something like education and bring in that inheritance only when it actually is relevant.

Where little or no improvement has been booked from the low base inherited from white rule, it is time to judge our progress on its own merits.

As we analyse the scourge of rape, let’s acknowledge that we have made absolutely no progress since 1994 – if anything, we have gone backwards. We can no longer link the cruelty and frequency of brutal rape to the fight against white rule – certainly not as a general explanation.

Equally, when we analyse the response of white society to 20 years of liberation, we in the media and the commentators we host need to look the issue in the eye, compare like with like and dare sometimes to make an unpopular point.

A 20-year-old man who rapes a 110- year-old woman is not a victim of his father’s oppression, he is a product of the society we have made these past 20 years.

Nor is the incompetence of local government a reason for affluent South Africans to reject social responsibility.

That is our own false equivalence.

Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch