You’re watching a football game. They refs called 7 penalties on each team. That’s some fair reffing, right? Calling out both sides the same amount.
What if one side actually committed 50 penalties, and the other side committed 2? Is calling 7 penalties on each team still “fair”?
The American media uses this model of “fairness”. They’re “unbiased” if they always criticize both sides equally, or give each side equal airtime, even if those sides are a pathologically lying criminal with a thousand gaffes worse than the worst gaffe of the other side. When you work in this framework, you are essentially working for the worst side by normalizing their behavior, downplaying their faults, and unfairly amplifying the faults of their opponents. It’s garbage. It’s not fair, it’s not balanced, it’s not ethical, it’s not intelligent, and it’s a significant part of why someone like Trump can operate and the media can pretend like this is somehow within the norms and enable him.
Conservatives have been “working the refs” for decades. If the media actually presents a fair, accurate report, they’ll scream “liberal media!” (Because you know, 96% of the US media owned by 6 giant corporations really loves liberalism). So the media will worry about appearing unbiased, and then stack their next story slight in favor of conservatives. The conservatives again scream “liberal media! biased! unfair!” and the media then responds by stacking the story even more in their favor to avoid the appearance of being biased.
And even though now the media is MASSIVELY stacked in favor of conservatives, they’re still screaming “liberal media! biased!” and the media is still catering to that even though they’ve learned the last 50 times that it doesn’t work.
It’s also the fault of enligthened centrist types who want to feel smart by being above partisanship. They’ll say things like “you think they’re destroying the country, they think you’re destroying the country. You’re both the same and I’m smart enough to realize that when you don’t!” But their view is dogmatic and never changes based on the reality of the situation. Everyone is always equally bad. Even if one side gets 100x worse, then obviously the other side must’ve somehow gotten 100x worse too, because they have to always be equally bad. This sort of person might say “you think flat earthers are idiots and blind to the truth. flat earthers think you’re idiots and blind to the truth! you’re both the same and you can’t see it!” because they have no regard for the reality of the situation, that flat earthers are actually fucking morons, and that republicans are objectively, undoubtedly significantly worse in every way than democrats.
John Stewart is very astute and knows in his heart what the real situation is, but he can be a victim of appearing to be “unbiased” in this way. He thinks it builds credibility among moderates, but it actually just normalizes the attitude I described above.
