Journalism professors Jay Rosen and Richard Sambrook on political asymmetry and false equivalence
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and Cardiff University journalism professor (former BBC World News Director) Richard Sambrook discuss political asymmetry and false equivalence failures in journalism.
Jay: “The difficulty of reacting to an asymmetrical political environment is a huge crisis for impartiality.”
Richard: “False equivalence is the main criticism of impartiality. …that’s not the benchmark for it. That is evidence of it failing. If impartiality is done properly…then you don’t fall for the false equivalence trap, because you’ve properly weighted the evidence and reflected that in the way that you report. But, that is hard work, it takes time, it’s often expensive, and that’s another reason why we’ve got a lot of opinion, because opinion is much easier and much cheaper, and lots of people like it, so it produces the clicks and produces the revenue.”
Excerpted from the Journalism & Democratic Backsliding webinar, 19 October 2023 with the Cambridge Disinformation Summit webinar series. Full webinar available at: • Journalism & Democratic Backsliding: ...