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For most journalists, balance means presenting all sides of an issue without appearing to favor any one position. The quest for balance presents challenges for journalists. For one thing, time and space constraints do not always permit representing multiple sides of a story. So journalists have simplified things by “telling both sides of a story.” Recounting news stories as two-sided dramas not only takes less time, it also enables journalists to set up conflicts in their reports. Conflict usually sells, as it simplifies real-world experiences and under-represents the complexity of social problems.

For example, reporters may treat the abortion controversy as a war between two extreme positions: One side advocates no abortion at all, ever, while the other calls for abortion on demand for everyone. In presenting the two sides, a reporter might select the most incendiary quotations he or she can find from representatives of both positions—further enhancing the drama. In fact, though, the majority of Americans’ views on abortion fall somewhere between the two extremes. Yet these more moderate or nuanced perspectives seldom are reflected in news reports.

Other journalists take a different approach to dealing with the problem of balance. They stake out a moderate or middle-of-the-road position between the two sides they have presented in a story. By offering a third-person, seemingly all-knowing point of view (a narrative device preferred by many novelists), they appear to transcend judgment of the issue in the story and thus give the impression of neutrality. This can further backfire, though, when journalists give coverage to fringe views; even if journalists treat an extreme point of view as an outlier, the attention paid to those views can shift the conversation in that fringe direction—reorienting the perceived middle of the road to a different, skewed middle. For example, although the vast majority of the scientific community agrees that climate change is real and caused by humankind, journalists sometimes give voice to climate change deniers on the fringes in order to maintain a sense of “balance.”