Does a dissenting view still have a right to be heard?

“Why would you give that person oxygen?”

It’s a question I’ve heard uttered countless times by radio producers and journalists alike. Usually, they’re referring to a particularly polarising politician or someone with an unpopular viewpoint on a hot button topic.

Last week during a spring clean, I unearthed an old news manual from my journalism studies dating back decades, and one particular sentence stuck out like a neon sign:

A dissenting view has a right to be heard.

The goal posts on this field have shifted a lot, particularly given the increasing influence of social media on the way news is both reported and consumed.

Today, not only are the dissenters not being heard, they’re being silenced.

In today’s journalistic world, often it seems less about the balance and all about the optics.

Realistically, as journalists, the only optic we should seek is to be seen as impartial, but so much news reporting these days completely ignores and dismisses any dissenting view.

What about ‘false balance,’ you might ask?

False balance occurs when equal weight is given to two opposing viewpoints, even if one side is not supported by evidence or fact.

Graeme Turner, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, notes there’s been a lot of industry conversation around the principle of ‘balance’ in news reporting – in other words, the allocation of equal time to opposing points of view in a news item.

The problem with this approach, he says, is that it can imply that all points of view are equally valid.

“When politicians just make stuff up, the principle of balance doesn’t allow the journalist to report this as politicians telling a lie or creating a fiction. Rather, they are required to relay the lie and then find another politician willing to contest it.”

Turner argues this turns ‘the facts’ into a matter of interpretation, rather than something that is either true or it isn’t.

However, a fact and a point of view are two very different things.

If a politician wants to express an opinion on something backed by science, should they not have the right to be heard?

Where it gets murky is when a journalist strays outside their actual job description.

It is not, nor has it ever been, the journalist’s role to lead their audience to a conclusion.

Supply the information responsibly, then it’s up to them to draw their own conclusion.

You stop being a journalist when your own views or opinions become the story.

There is a vast amount of that type of reporting permeating all forms of media thesedays. Sometimes it’s even encouraged as a means of engaging the audience as either a cheer squad or a lynch mob.

This shallow and cynical narrative underestimates the listeners’ ability to make their own decision.

Remember, there are some things in life that science cannot explain.

This article is brought to you by Radio Release.