One of the more interesting problems with giving both sides a say in every matter is that sometimes that means you end up drastically over-exposing one side.chris the cynic wrote:I think one of the biggest problems is that CNN feels the need to give both sides even if one of them is objectively wrong. They need to have their fact checker simply step in and call bullshit whenever someone is bullshitting. In politics I don't need to know the Republican and Democratic positions on every issue (unless I'm voting for these people) what I need to know is what is actually true.
For example, on the issue of climate change, Denmark has a fairly well known (even internationally) economist called Bjørn Lomborg, who made quite a name for himself applying economics to all the world's problems and then prioritising them according to how much bang we could get for our foreign aid buck in certain areas. The most serious problem with his method was that preventing global climate change costs a disproportionately huge amount of money compared to the improvement we'd get out of it, but if we don't fix the climate change, most other efforts are void because everything will go tits-up in the third world anyway - yes, congratulations on providing food and education to so many poor Africans, but their countries have now turned into a desert.
Anyway, when the question of climate change was still whether or not it was even man-made, almost all proper scientists in the country agreed that yes, it probably was, and we really had to try to do something about it. Bjørn Lomborg (I stress, not actually a scientist, but an economist) was pretty much the lone dissenting voice, but every news programme and every debate show dealing with the issue of climate change felt obliged to hear out both sides, so they would bring in one proper scientist and then Bjørn Lomborg, which completely failed to convey the fact that Bjørn Lomborg was the only person in the damn country holding his opinion, and that everybody else disagreed. You don't have to give both sides equal representation when one side is completely outweighed by the other to the point of insignificance.
He's since admitted that yeah all right, the global climate change is probably man made, but he still maintains that actually doing something about it is a waste of money. Maybe he's right, fucked if I know, but it still seems stupid not to give it a shot.