Media Balance
What is balance in media? Why is it important? How do we find it? Should we give air time to climate change deniers?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing balance in the media. Okay Peter, kick us off, you've got something on your mind with this.
Speaker B: relates also to a story from: Speaker A:needing a balance issue. Okay so I'm interested, specifically what was the, did you say it was a radio show or TV show? So yeah it was BBC Cambridgeshire radio I think. And what was it going to, it must have been about a certain aspect of climate change. He didn't mention what the
Speaker B:programme was about but they were having some sort of debate on the air and he was there to talk about climate change and the science of and they were having a climate change denier on there to
Speaker C:provide balance. Presumably by climate change denier we're probably talking about someone who accepts that climate change is sort of happening but doesn't think it's anything to do with humans
Speaker B:or something. Well he didn't go into that but the other thing I mentioned was the BBC Today programme. They're often criticised for this about the balance problem because they often sort of confound and confuse listeners because they do a similar thing. So often they've had Lord Lawson on as their kind of go-to climate change denier whenever they need balance, inverted commas. So I've seen criticisms of having him on the show where he's just an MP, no scientific training whatsoever, he's just known for having slightly wacky views including one thing which is the climate change. He's a good go-to guy for the opposite point of view from the mainstream. And the question is why do we seek this balance thing and if it's important how do we get it in the right place? How do we decide what, you know, you've got to decide roughly what's true in order to provide balance around that truth thing and at what point should the BBC just grow a pair and take a view on things which are obviously patently true? Okay so it reminds me a little bit of
Speaker A:another podcast we did where we talked about flat earthists and you could say well let's we're going to have a debate about whether we should return to the moon or not, whether that's a good idea, but let's make sure we get a flat earthist in as well. I'd take them all there,
Speaker B:I'd take them all with you and put them there, give them the ride of their life. Put them on
Speaker A:the exact other side of the earth. I mean I guess what we don't want to do here, we could sort of, okay I mean is climate change caused by humans, that's done and dusted right? And I think the scientific community is pretty much unanimous on that right? Well let's not even, I mean we don't
Speaker C:even need to go down that. Let's just say more or less. Let's just say go check out Wikipedia,
Speaker B:there are big loads of studies about how many scientists agree with human caused climate
Speaker C:change. It's about 95 percent. Yeah I mean I get kind of worried about the idea that well 95 percent of people agree, therefore there's you know no controversy. All that it shouldn't, you know, the alternative viewpoint shouldn't be discussed. And just you know as a kind of, as an illustration, I mean don't forget that the list of things that were you know at one point controversial includes things like you know the fact that meteorites came from outer space, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory of evolution, the germ theory of disease, the mechanical theory of heat, all of these things that are now totally accepted scientific fact were once ran counter to what everyone knew or at least believed that they knew. You know so we've got to be, I don't like the idea that the criterion for deciding whether or not something's settled is polling experts particularly. I'm not going to sit here and offer a simplistic alternative but I just want to say that often people will say well 95 percent of climate scientists agree, therefore it's settled and you know there's no need to have a debate. I don't think one follows from the other.
Speaker A:So are there other, I mean are there other examples, other areas we can think of? I mean we gave you the example of climate change. What other areas potentially which appear to be contentious but in actual fact are probably wrapped up. Is there something similar? Well there's an analogy,
Speaker B:I think there's an analogy with something else that we've done to death and other people have done to death, Brexit. So is Brexit a good idea or not? During the Brexit campaign both sides, neither side gave very convincing or detailed arguments about what the economic benefits or the social benefits of remaining or leaving actually were. So there wasn't very much information out
Speaker C:there for people to make an informed decision. I think this is an interesting test case right, well it's recent, it's in everyone's mind and actually something we could use to discuss this topic of balance. So rather than looking at a number of different issues and ask what balance looks like, if you take the Brexit issue and this is where I think people's allegation of sort of liberal bias in the media and things like the BBC particularly is often being accused of liberal bias and that among other things actually is why they're so keen to show that they're balanced. But there were a lot of people talking about economic benefits and it's as far as I can judge, the economic benefits of staying in the EU quite clearly outweigh the economic benefits of leaving. So it's definitely a net economic positive to stay in the EU, that's more or less settled. But that isn't, the point is that people who voted Brexit by and large weren't voting about on economic issues. You could look balanced by choosing to hold a discussion about the economic benefits or costs of staying in the EU because then you could have people on both sides but it would be clear that the arguments for staying, the economic arguments for staying were probably stronger than the economic arguments for leaving. But then that would ignore the fact that there are a whole load of other arguments that people in fact were swayed by. And so things like immigration which I can see, I can sort of imagine why the BBC might want to avoid those sorts of discussions. But yeah, anyway, so the BBC's charter doesn't, there's an agreement accompanying the charter which merely tells them to cover things that are controversial in a balanced way. And I guess that's the key thing is how do we know when something is controversial vsettled? Are there objective criteria we can point to that say, this is no longer controversial. In a sense, is it enough that you have some significant majority of people or significant minority on one side, if it's 60-40 or 70-30 or if it's 99% of people think something's the case, does it stop being controversial? Is there a cut off there somewhere?
Speaker A:I'm trying to think how the mechanics of a decision would be made about this by let's say, I don't know, a producer or editor at the BBC or at this local news station. At what point would they say to themselves, why would we have, yes, we need balance but all this is settled. Maybe they would argue that it's not settled, I don't know. Well, I mean, the BBC have got an army of
Speaker B:researchers whose job it is to inform the news desks, the reporting, the website and to feed programmes like the Today programme and all the other news programmes and comment programmes. So they've got this army of researchers whose job it is to find content, find useful things and interesting things and prime the production and prime the scripts and prime the questions. So if they were doing their job right, they could quite, and they had regional and subject matter experts, they could get a good feel for what is broadly the scientific consensus on any topic. And I should reflect what's kind of in literature and in the academic community that's looking at that topic. But the problem is that the kind of, there's often a sort of correlation between the kind of the liberal left kind of ideas and worries and whinges with the scientific progression. So, you know, climate change is 97% believed to be true by the academics, but that's still quite a liberal kind of thing to worry about, particularly in the US. But it's, you know, it's kind of taken as a given amongst most scientists. I mean, you're starting to sort of get onto what
Speaker A:I was thinking about the 95% of scientists believe that human made climate change is pretty much established. But if you would go to the population at large in the UK, let's say, I wonder what percentage of people think? Yeah, I think a lot. I think a lot less. It's going to be a lot less. Closer to 50%. So that's where the BBC might sort of turn around and say, well, look, we need balance
Speaker B:because half the population, you know. Yeah. So is it balance against your readership? So cynically, you might say, well, they're just worried about missing out on viewing those figures, because they're trying to satisfy the public. Or are they, should they be being balanced around what is where the real truth point is? And that's where it goes back to the BBC charter, where I think
Speaker C:one of the things it talks about is education, I think. But this is, I think, where this is the thing that worries me about deciding to throw balance out in cases where you think it's settled is that sometimes, you know, it's very hard to know about your own biases. And I feel like, you know, some people think that certain things are absolutely obviously true. I mean, I'll give you a reasonably controversial example. I mean, it's not that controversial because it's been covered on more or less. But let's take the gender wage gap, right? Every year, the earning survey comes out. And then there's a story about the gender wage gap, the fact that women are getting paid less than men. Now, everyone who's done serious research into the drivers of any wage gap has concluded that there isn't really. It really doesn't really exist. You know, the gap is between the types of work that women do, you know, the kinds of levels of seniority that they're at, the fact that part-time versus full-time and all of those kinds of things, that actually people doing the same job, men and women, get paid the same, more or less, with a almost minuscule kind of difference. Now, the way that that's covered on the BBC sort of suggests that, well, the wage gap is a real thing. And that's, you know, and I can see that that makes sense because that is more or less the consensus of people who haven't kind of gone out of their
Speaker B:way to- On the BBC, it's covered as if it's a matter of opinion, when actually it's a thing you can measure and test and you can demonstrate that it is or isn't there. Well, it's even, I'm not sure
Speaker C:it's quite as simple as that because, of course, you know, any study is going to have to make certain assumptions, you know, about there's going to be the way that you sample the data and all those kinds of things. So, and I think, you know, in real life, there's, you know, it's always difficult to work out what actually, you know, how to interpret scientific studies. There's always the possibility of some sort of selection bias or, you know, or some other variable that you haven't collected data on and controlled for. But it's just that if you look at the way that the BBC covers issues which kind of are difficult for, you know, people from the left to think about. So, I mean, if you, I think if you take, you know, based on my understanding of, you know, the kind of people who work at the BBC and make editorial decisions, they're going to be, you know, as inclined to think, well, the existence of the gender pay gap is obviously a real thing. Now, maybe we'd better get some weirdo men's rights type guy on for a bit of balance, but we kind of don't really need that because it's settled. And they would also quite naturally think, well, anthropogenic climate change is settled. So, maybe we should get a climate change denier on, you know, for a bit of balance, but that's basically settled. And the thing is that one of those things probably, at least in my view, does exist and one of them doesn't. And yet, you know, you can see how an institution's biases, what it sort of culturally holds to be obviously true can still have biases. You know, even if it thinks it's trying to, even if it thinks it's trying to, you know, to be as objective as possible. And that's my worry about doing away with balance.
Speaker B:I mean, I'm not advocating that we get rid of this concept of balance in the media. I take issue with the way that the balance has arrived at. So, I have faith that the BBC researchers and the people feeding the content to the Today programme, etc, they have done their research a bit and they have seen the previous 20, 30 years is indicating that the debate on human climate change, no human climate change, has gone a certain direction. So, they're sort of, they are, they should be advocating that particular direction. Because I have faith that the academic system, for all its inefficiencies, generally does find new revelations and does dispel old held biased beliefs and all sorts of things. So, a good example would be, you know, Einstein came up with a load of new theories and was very unpopular amongst the sort of classic Newtonian physics. The physics of that time, they thought they had basically nailed it and they understood how the whole universe works. But Einstein, working on the back of some of the things that Planck had done and all sorts of things, came up with a whole new set of theories that totally undermined all of that. And eventually, it's taken 50 years, 80 years, for a lot of his theories to be demonstrated. But we've got there, we've got this whole new
Speaker C:branch of physics because of Einstein. Yeah, I think the problem is that the kinds of things that people talk about on the BBC are sort of messy social problems. That's where, you know, it's not as clear cut as, well, here's an absolutely killer, here's a Mitchelson-Morley type experiment where we can just show that, you know, that a certain theory of light propagation is wrong. You know, it's things like, should we ban energy drinks? You know, and you'll get someone from the British, from the BMA, you know, coming on and saying, you know, yes, they cause obesity, you know, and then you get someone else sort of saying, well, no, because we shouldn't just, you know, ban people from buying things, even if they're bad for them. And that's what most of the debates look like, you know, if you listen to the Today programme, there isn't going to be some killer bit of evidence out there, you know, in a sense, sort of both sides have got something to say there. And they're disagreeing, you know, sometimes not even disagreeing about facts necessary, but disagreeing about what we ought to do. Yeah. You know, so it's a kind of, you know, to take the sort of hypothetical Brexit debate, you know, you might have people who are saying, well, the economy is important. And other people saying, well, social cohesion is important. And we don't like immigration, we think it undermines it. And that would be a disagreement about which of those things would be, is more important rather than a disagreement about facts. So yeah, I guess all I'm saying is that I'm instinctively concerned about the idea that we should sort of abandon balance, or at least, you know, I know no one's saying we should, but at least that, you know, someone should be able to say, well, this one, even though it's controversial, we all know, we all, us here, us intelligent people, we all know that really, this is settled. So we're not going to bother with balance, we're not going to get those cranks and weirdos on who, you know, who think that meteorites come from outer space, because we all know they're generated by volcanoes. That's the thing, that's my concern, is that, you know, in fact, that decision is going to have to be made by someone who is just as likely as anyone else to have a certain set of biases going on.
Speaker A:We had another podcast where we talk about long-held beliefs that were then reversed, right? Didn't we? Didn't we do that? Yes, we did. And wouldn't that fall into this category where, and there were some things, I know we mentioned early on, you gave a list of stuff, but there were some things that, you know, where orthodoxy received, and received orthodoxy for a long, long time.
Speaker C:Well, I mean, take social, there's loads of social stuff. I mean, this is more about preferences. Yeah, no, but is there anything that's sort of more in the scientific realm of things? Yeah, it's all, science is easy, it's easy to point to loads of scientific revolutions where absolutely total orthodoxy has been overturned by facts, but it's also social preferences, you know, that you take, you know, 150 years ago, you could marry a 12-year-old, but, you know, homosexuality was a criminal offence, and it's the other way around now. You know, social change often eventually, you know, starts out with someone being very transgressive and very controversial, and, you know, where everyone else knows that this is some, a new and harmful way of behaving, which, you know, eventually leads to everyone adopting that and realising, or at least, you know, coming to the conclusion that it's better.
Speaker B:So, in summary then, I think this concept of balance, the way that it's done with the BBC, this kind of, this shouting match you get onto the Today programme, which ends up leaving you more confused than you were when you started listening to it, that is quite entertaining, growing up disagreeing with each other, is important in sort of social debates where it's a matter of opinion, but there are scientific things that you can rely on the body of evidence to say, look, this is, we're kind of 98% sure that this is right, maybe we'll get someone who's got an extreme view, but they're really very rare compared to the climate change people who are more talking about what's the best way of dealing with this problem. That's that, and that was the sort of the theme of these articles which I was reading, is that, making the point that truth isn't the midpoint between everyone's opinions, there are certain things which are known, you know, which you can, are more demonstrably true than other things, scientific things, and that a kind of straw poll of people's opinions is not necessarily a good heuristic for truth, but it sometimes is, so that's why we have elections.
Speaker C:Yeah, and I think people's discomfort with saying that, with just coming out and saying, look, I know 50% people think this is true, but they're wrong, is that I think there is a sort of the prevailing sort of wind over the last 50 years of relativism, which more or less says, well, no one can really know what the truth is, and your opinion is as good as mine. I mean, the problem with that view is it does fall down when most people are wrong, which happens quite a lot, you know, so I think it is, but as I said, I mean, I think the balance, it's more the ideal of having balance, in theory, you don't need it, just go and find out what the facts are, you don't even need experts at all, just report what the facts are, you know, that's the theory, it's like, you know, Allman's disagreement theorem, or Allman's agreement theorem, which says that two rational people can't ever disagree, even if they've got different information, when they learn about each other's information sets, more or less, they will always completely converge on exactly the same opinions. In theory, you don't need balance, you just need some facts. In practice, I think it's a really good sort of institutional safeguard to spend, to focus on it, even at the expense of, you know, occasionally having weirdos on, and occasionally promoting views which are pretty much well outside the orthodoxy.
Speaker B:Okay, I think, yeah, Peter? Well, that leads me on to a direction on to which I wanted to steer this podcast. Okay, but... Towards the thorny island of fake news. Right, okay. And I think, because this is an interesting question, the BBC has a unique position, so we're just concentrating on the BBC as a unique position within the media, in the world, so it's public money, it's funded largely, well, proportioned by, and it is a charter to provide education, among other social goods to the British and the global public. So, I mean, the charter comes up every 10 years, and there's a big debate about what the BBC should be doing, and it's public, and anyone can get involved. But I mean, I would like to see the BBC's purpose sort of quite fundamentally changed, not to be a traditional media outlet, because if you look at the BBC, strip all the branding away from the BBC, it doesn't look much different from, say, ITV or Channel 4, it just looks like it's pumping out stuff, making programs, it could be the same kind of thing. Whereas, if BBC using its unique position, concentrated on providing a independent verification, fact-checking service, I'm thinking like Snopes or PolitiFact, like that sort of thing on steroids, a bigger thing, that provides a sort of counterpoint challenge to any outrageous views on any poll on the spectrum, so it kind of becomes like a ministry of truth, although it's not. Yeah, that'd be great, then no one would listen to it, and it would get shut down. Well, that's because we're using the wrong metrics for deciding how successful it is.
Speaker C:Yeah, but you've got to, I mean, the reason the BBC does things like produce EastEnders, which anyone, you might think, well, ITV should be doing that, and BBC should be doing documentaries about Schoenberg, but the fact is that the existence of their charter and the way they're funded depends on their being popular. So yes, it's a very, again, Peter, it's a well-engineered solution, but I mean, the fact is that the BBC depends on political support. Fact-checking just isn't that popular.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think, yeah, it doesn't sound very attractive to me what you suggested, Peter, but listen, just before we finish, what thing do you know to be true and or a fact that you wish more people also acknowledge to be true or a fact? As an example, it's a fact that skinny jeans are shit and rubbish and should never be worn by anyone. Why don't more people understand that? That's my one, just throwing that out there.
Speaker C:Yeah, I've got one, which is really driven partly by the fact that I've got delayed sleep phase disorder, but just that everyone is getting up too early. Everyone, this is just so well attested, like kids go to school too early, it's bad for them. People go to work too early, it's bad for them. People should be able to knock off and have a nap in the afternoon. It's the, you know, it's much healthier to do that. And, you know, the science is settled, but yet will people do it? No. Everyone's scared of making the first move, or maybe people don't believe it, but it's...
Speaker B:Everyone's got to get their towel on the bench first, otherwise they miss out on the bench. So it's kind of a, it kind of devolves into a tragedy of the commons, doesn't it? It does. Everyone's trying to get into work one minute before everyone else, you know. Peter? Okay, I'm going to be, I'm going to be controversial and say I wish everyone realised that Jeremy Corbyn would be a terrible Prime Minister. So I thought we were going to follow
Speaker A:through with some of the exact, yeah, but no, okay. No, I can just leave it at that. Just that, just that.
Speaker B:It's so patently obvious to me that he'd be... Mind you, they all said he'd make a terrible Labour
Speaker C:leader and no one would vote for him. And then look what happened then. There we go. Some people did vote for him. Well, but arguably he is a pretty terrible Labour leader as well. Well, but what's your metric? I mean, he took vast numbers of votes away from the Tories. That's got to be judged as a success.
Speaker A:Yeah. Okay, we'll stop there. Thank you, gentlemen. And thank you, as always, to listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.
