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False balance

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Reporting on a fringe assertion as if it were legitimate debate

This article is about the media term. For the informal fallacy, see Argument to moderation. For the fallacy of inconsistency, see False equivalence. For the Wikipedia policy, see WP:FALSEBALANCE.

"Both sides" redirects here. For the album, see Both Sides.

This article needs additional citations for verification . Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.<br>Find sources: "False balance" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

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Among climate scientists in 2013, 97% of peer-reviewed papers that took a position on the cause of global warming said that humans are responsible, while 3% said they were not. Meanwhile, 69% of Fox News guests on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stories in late 2013 were "climate contrarians".[1]<br>False balance , known colloquially as bothsidesism , is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a cause of misinformation.[2][3][4]

False balance is a bias which often stems from an attempt to avoid bias and gives unsupported or dubious positions an illusion of respectability. It creates a public perception that some issues are scientifically contentious, although in reality they are not, therefore creating doubt about the scientific state of research. This can be exploited by interest groups such as corporations like the fossil fuel industry or the tobacco industry, or ideologically motivated activists such as vaccination opponents or creationists.[5] False balance can be the result of viewpoint discrimination or political bias.[6] Political bias can be evaluated relative to the median voter for particular topics.[7]

Description and origin<br>[edit]

False balance emerges from the ideal of journalistic objectivity, where factual news is presented in a way that allows the reader to make determinations about how to interpret the facts, and interpretations or arguments around those facts are left to the opinion pages. Because many newsworthy events have two or more opposing camps making competing claims, news media are responsible for reporting all (credible or reasonable) opposing positions, along with verified facts that may support one or the other side of an issue. At one time, when false balance was prevalent, news media sometimes reported all positions as though they were equally credible, even though the facts clearly contradicted a position, or there was a substantial consensus on one side of an issue, and only a fringe or nascent theory supporting the other side. In the 2020s, in contrast to prior decades, most media are willing to advocate for a particular viewpoint which they regarded as better evidenced.[citation needed] For instance, claims that the Earth is not warming are regularly referred to in news (vs. only editorials) as "denial", "misleading", or "debunked".[8][failed verification]

Prior to this shift, media would sometimes list...