By Dom Serafini
The enemy of balanced news is political and social extremism from both the far left and the far right.
These days, the airwaves, print media, and cyberspace are crowded with reports of biased news, fake news, misleading news, disinformation, rumors, propaganda, and the like. All of these foster conspiracy theories from both extremist camps.
What is certain is that nowadays it is difficult to find balanced news. The news economy doesn’t help either since it financially rewards (with ads and readership) the media entity that slants news according to what its followers want to hear.
The only solution seems to be to read or listen to all kind of media, which is labor-intensive, tiresome, time-consuming, tedious, and expensive.
Personally, I tend to read or listen to local media during my travels, but my steady diet of news tends to come from The Wall Street Journal, which leans right, and The New York Times, which skews left, being careful to avoid their biased comment pages. To alleviate the tediousness of the Times, I sometimes also read the left-leaning The New Yorker since it enlivens the news with funny cartoons.
Despite all my good intentions in flying above the fray, when I write for the consumer media, I struggle to make the pieces evenly appreciated no matter how balanced the piece is. Perhaps, the way to know if an article is balanced is when complaints come from all sides, indistinguishably from the left and the right. Making everyone unhappy now seems to be the only way to assure a balanced report.
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