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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/28/bari-weiss-and-the-tyranny-of-false-balance/>
"Bari Weiss walked into
60 Minutes and asked the staff: “Why does the country
think you’re biased?”
The question stunned them into awkward silence. And it should have—not because
it caught them off guard, but because it reveals everything wrong with what
passes for journalistic sophistication in our moment.
Let’s be precise about what Weiss is doing. She’s not asking whether
60
Minutes is actually biased. She’s not evaluating their coverage against
standards of accuracy, fairness, or adherence to facts. She’s asking why “the
country” perceives bias—which treats that perception as fact requiring
accommodation regardless of whether the perception corresponds to reality.
This is false balance perfected. The sophisticated move that treats “Trump and
his allies say you’re biased” as equivalent evidence to actual journalistic
practice. The epistemic surrender that makes public opinion—shaped by
coordinated disinformation campaigns, algorithmic manipulation, and deliberate
attacks on legitimate journalism—into the arbiter of what counts as fair
coverage.
When the President calls judicial review “insurrection,” when his advisers
threaten to ignore court rulings, when federal agents conduct warrantless mass
detentions—
60 Minutes covering these facts isn’t bias. It’s journalism. And
when Trump and his allies attack that coverage as partisan, the proper response
isn’t “how do we address these perceptions?” It’s “we report what’s happening.”
But Weiss has built a career on reframing accommodation as courage. Her brand
rests on the premise that mainstream journalism, academia, and cultural
institutions have been captured by the left and need correction toward
“balance.” This framework treats asymmetric reality as if it were symmetric
controversy—and what the
New York Times reports about her first weeks at
CBS reveals how this plays out in practice.
She’s reportedly personally booking Netanyahu, Jared Kushner, and Steve
Witkoff—architects of Trump’s Middle East policy—while urging executives to
identify newsroom leakers. And she’s asking a newsroom that views itself as
nonpartisan to justify why coordinated attacks on them have gained traction.
She’s not asking whether Netanyahu’s government has committed actions worthy of
critical coverage or whether Trump’s peace plan deserves scrutiny beyond its
architects’ preferred framing—she’s ensuring powerful right-wing figures get
platforms while shifting the burden from those making false claims to those
reporting facts.
This matters because even journalists who genuinely believe they’re defending
fairness can fall into this trap. The frame is seductive: “Both sides claim
bias, therefore the truth must be somewhere in the middle.” But this only works
when both sides operate in good faith. When one side systematically attacks any
accountability journalism as partisan while the other tries to report
accurately, splitting the difference doesn’t produce balance—it produces
capitulation.
The question “why does the country think you’re biased?” does something
structurally insidious regardless of Weiss’s intentions. It treats coordinated
attacks on legitimate journalism as evidence requiring response rather than as
bad-faith manipulation requiring exposure. It makes perceived bias—manufactured
through deliberate campaigns—into a problem journalism must solve by changing
coverage rather than a weapon journalism must resist by maintaining standards.
The danger isn’t that journalists become propagandists overnight—it’s that they
internalize propaganda’s logic while believing they’re protecting neutrality."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
