My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #12, October 4, 1999

WHEN FAIR PLAY ISN'T FAIR

Americans are a tolerant sort most of the time. We don't much like extremes of ideas and passions, and tend to think truth usually falls somewhere in between. We dislike unfairness -- if one side is given a chance to speak, we think the other side should get to speak as well. These virtues make it easier for our ragtag collection of people of all races and religions and ethnic groups and political opinions to live together peacefully.

They are virtues, however, that do not necessarily work to our advantage.

In journalism, the notion of fairness manifests itself in getting "both sides" of an issue. If the issue is abortion, reporters will interview the head of NOW and the head of a right-to-life group. If the two leaders say diametrically opposite things, reporters rarely make any effort to determine what the facts are, because they would appear to be to taking sides. Readers are left to figure out for themselves where the truth lies in these mutually contradictory statements, statistics, and "facts."

This is a remarkably unhelpful approach even when there are in fact only two sides. But in most cases, there are many sides to an issue, many aspects not even touched on in most news stories. In the case of abortion, most of us are ill-at-ease with either of the extreme positions -- we are queasy about the snuffing out of fetuses, especially once they are viable, and equally queasy about government compelling women to deliver babies against their will.

Most of us understand that abortion is a zero-sum game involving two lives, and when one wins, the other necessarily loses. Whether we are on the side of the infant or the mother will depend entirely on individual circumstances. If the woman was raped, or if she suffers from chronic disease and her health will be permanently damaged by the pregnancy, most of us place her rights above the infant's. If the fetus is near term, we're more likely to place its rights above the woman's. If she sleeps around, doesn't use birth control, and has had multiple abortions, we may see abortion as letting her off the hook for her actions (though this attitude comes close to viewing the child as a punishment).

Those who are not emotionally involved with the decision may view it more abstractly, asking things like: What are the economic consequences of outlawing abortions? What has historically happened when abortions are unavailable, and is that outcome acceptable to us? What are the social and moral consequences of freely available abortions? What is the experience of states with differing policies? If the state can intrude on THIS private decision, what other private actions might it try to control? What could society do to make unwanted pregnancies rarer? Those questions and their answers are not available to us when reporters insist on using the "both sides of the issue" model.

Another insidious effect of the "both sides" model is that it can be manipulated. Holocaust deniers have managed to get their case before the public eye by demanding that in fairness "their side" of the story must be told as well. This would be well and good if there was any legitimate doubt that the Holocaust occurred, but there is none. Rarely has any historical event had such mountains of documentation. Rarely has any historical event so indisputably been a fact.

Even if you choose to discount the testimony of thousands of Holocaust victims who all tell variants on the same story; even if you discount the testimony of American soldiers who liberated the camps and witnessed starving inmates and mass graves; even if you discount photographs of mounds of corpses on the grounds that photographs can be doctored; even if you discount the testimony of concentration camp guards and war criminals who actually bragged about killing Jews; even then, you can't ignore the document trail, the painstaking records of gold teeth extracted, melted down, and sold, of purchases of Zyklon B gas, of the huge numbers of boxcars offloaded at Dachau and Auschwitz. You can't ignore the detailed case studies of Nazi medical experiments.

When any publication treats Holocaust denial as the "other side" they are not just guilty of ignoring fact -- they have been snookered by people who are using our virtues against us.

A similar tactic is used by the creationists. When they tried to sneak Biblical creation into the public school curriculum, they kept losing in court because schools are forbidden to endorse any religion. Evolution, on the other hand, is taught because it is science. They realized that the way to get creation into the schools was to present it as science while simultaneously declaring that evolution itself was merely unproven theory. In fairness, then, schools would be obliged to present both "views."

As it happens, I agree with Neil Postman that teaching both creationism and evolution in science class is actually a splendid way to show students how science operates. By showing the observations evolutionary theory was based on, the hypotheses it generated that led to further gathering of information, and the observations of ongoing evolution in species, science teachers can demonstrate that science is a method through which theories may be enlarged or refuted. Comparing that with creationism, which has to ignore or explain away huge facts of geology and comparative anatomy, will make it clear that creationism, whatever kind of metaphorical or allegorical truth it may have, is not science but a ploy.

Our belief that truth must lie between two extremes of argument can also be manipulated by the simple act of moving the extremes. The rise of conservative political talk shows has pushed the "middle" rightwards over the past ten years. By staging political food fights between radical conservatives and the kind of "liberals" who used to be called Rockefeller Republicans, by choosing Michael Kinsley and Bill Press rather than Jim Hightower and Barbara Ehrenreich to represent "liberal" views, conservatives have virtually eliminated genuine populist liberalism from the national political dialogue, forcing it to hide out in small publications like The Nation and Mother Jones. A similar pushing of the middle off to one end of the spectrum occurred in our national dialogue before the Civil War, making it possible for Northerners and Southerners to regard each other as mortal enemies.

It seems a pity that our dislike of extremes and our fairmindedness, two of our greatest virtues, can be so used against us. The quality of our available information suffers, and our public discussions can be manipulated by political con artists. The best defense we have may lie in understanding our vulnerability, and in resistance.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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