All Opinions Are Not Equally Valid
Aug. 17th, 2009 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleFrom time to time, I've been called out by commenters regarding my intolerance of Republican and conservative ideology and the people who support them. And one thing that's often said is that even if I can't agree with those positions, I should "at least" respect the opinions of others.
I think we've gotten to a place where people think their opinions are sort of like babies -- darling creatures that should be universally cooed over merely by virtue of being babies. Just as no decent person would ever tell someone their baby is ugly or even funny-looking, no decent person should ever call out someone's opinion as being misguided or bigoted or just completely nuts. Every opinion has become equally valid merely by virtue of being someone's darling opinion.
This problem of course didn't start online or among the everyday public -- it was created and nurtured by our mainstream media and our press. Within the last couple of decades, it has somehow become mandatory for the media to cover "all sides" of a debate -- even when some or at least one of those sides may be absolutely deranged. This is called "fair and balanced" reporting and not what it really is -- giving a national platform, and thereby lending credibility, to hidden-agenda idealogues, corporate shills, religious fanatics, and in some cases, flat-out lunatics. In the mainstream media's case, I don't think it has much to do with "respecting" opinions and more to do with ratings, sensationalism, and the fact that we don't have a free press -- we have a press that is essentially controlled by huge corporations that lean heavily right. This nonsense has become so entrenched that many of us now believe that the polite thing to do is to have -- or at least, to express -- respect for all opinions.
It wasn't always like this. There was certainly a time when the press did a better job of reporting reality instead of giving a voice to blathering idiocy in the name of "balance." Rick Perlstein has a great piece about it in The Washington Post:
Read the whole article here.
We need to abandon the fallacy that all opinions are equally valid and that every crack-brained theory, manufactured paranoia and demonstrable lie somehow deserves thoughtful, respectful public debate in our largest media channels. All this fairness and balance is killing the country.
I think we've gotten to a place where people think their opinions are sort of like babies -- darling creatures that should be universally cooed over merely by virtue of being babies. Just as no decent person would ever tell someone their baby is ugly or even funny-looking, no decent person should ever call out someone's opinion as being misguided or bigoted or just completely nuts. Every opinion has become equally valid merely by virtue of being someone's darling opinion.
This problem of course didn't start online or among the everyday public -- it was created and nurtured by our mainstream media and our press. Within the last couple of decades, it has somehow become mandatory for the media to cover "all sides" of a debate -- even when some or at least one of those sides may be absolutely deranged. This is called "fair and balanced" reporting and not what it really is -- giving a national platform, and thereby lending credibility, to hidden-agenda idealogues, corporate shills, religious fanatics, and in some cases, flat-out lunatics. In the mainstream media's case, I don't think it has much to do with "respecting" opinions and more to do with ratings, sensationalism, and the fact that we don't have a free press -- we have a press that is essentially controlled by huge corporations that lean heavily right. This nonsense has become so entrenched that many of us now believe that the polite thing to do is to have -- or at least, to express -- respect for all opinions.
It wasn't always like this. There was certainly a time when the press did a better job of reporting reality instead of giving a voice to blathering idiocy in the name of "balance." Rick Perlstein has a great piece about it in The Washington Post:
"It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.
The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest."
Read the whole article here.
We need to abandon the fallacy that all opinions are equally valid and that every crack-brained theory, manufactured paranoia and demonstrable lie somehow deserves thoughtful, respectful public debate in our largest media channels. All this fairness and balance is killing the country.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-18 02:59 pm (UTC)For instance, look at something like Intelligent Design and Creationism. The whole idea is to present Intelligent Design as an alternate scientific theory when it isn't. In order to make it an alternate theory you have to (as ID people do) claim that all science is just people acting on faith, whether they "choose to believe" evolution or ID or creationism.
I remember people complaining about a Daily Show "debate" with a scientist, an ID person and a Creationist. I didn't even like the idea of this being a debate since only one person was dealing with scientific facts, but other people were angry at it not being "balanced" enough because they felt the ID guy was made to look bad because the scientist supporting evolution got to speak last, and also they also had on a creationist guy which they thought suggested ID was the same as creationism (which is basically is).
no subject
Date: 2009-08-19 02:09 am (UTC)Exactly, and the supporters of ID very cleverly use the argument that they "just" have a differing opinion that deserves to be heard...even though their opinion that ID is a scientific theory as valid as evolution is absolute bunk. They want schools to "teach the controversy" but the problem is that there is no controversy except the one they've manufactured. At the rate we are going, we'll soon be "teaching the controversy" that the sun revolves around the earth or that the earth may actually be flat -- hey, why can't those be valid "opinions" as well, deserving of public debate? While we're at it, let's have a debate over whether witches are causing the drought in the southwest or whether raindrops are actually God's tears. Those are opinions too, so surely they must also have some validity.