We are constantly told that today’s political scene — and by extension, modern life in general — has become too polarized. According to this idea, progressives and conservatives have gone too far in opposite directions, creating a profoundly harmful sense of disunity and division. At the heart of this supposed issue lies the media. In recent years, news outlets from CNN to the BBC have pursued a vague idea of “impartiality” and “centrism,” but this decision has only led to more bias — and bias of a far more dangerous sort.
But first off, let’s not mince words: in most cases, this phenomenon is not accidental. 90 percent of the news in the US is controlled by just six profit-driven corporations, which are themselves owned by the wealthiest Americans. In an era in which enforcing stricter taxes on the upper class is decidedly a feature of liberal policy, it’s no wonder that the owners of some of the biggest media companies have subtly shifted towards conservative viewpoints. They’ve simply chosen to remain under the guise of “centrism” (and we’ll get to that later) while doing so.
This obsession with impartiality is most evidently dangerous through the media’s abuse of science. The BBC is the example that first comes to mind — specifically their policy to “represent all points of view.” At first glance, this seems to be a noble goal — but it’s led to the BBC platforming a lot of misinformation. Earlier this year, the BBC interviewed a “vaccine skeptic”, whose blatant incorrectness went unchallenged by the show’s host. While the BBC eventually apologized for this, that sadly wasn’t the case with other, similar incidents. In 2022, David Jordan, director of editorial policy at the BBC, said that “occasionally it might be appropriate to interview a flat-earther” — and the BBC has done just that, putting a definitive scientific falsehood on the level of objective, demonstrable truth.
The BBC has drawn a false equivalency between scientific fact and amateur opinion, and the impacts of such blunders have been further exacerbated by the BBC’s near-universal perception as a factual, unbiased source. More worrying, still, is the fact that they’re not alone. CNN’s new leadership has openly embraced a policy to make itself more like Fox News — an outlet renowned for its shameless right-wing bias. Even the New York Times, a supposedly liberal site, published an article in 2011 that fed unsound anti-vaccine fears.
Furthermore, it would be remiss of me to argue against this false “impartiality” without bringing up the elephant in the room: transphobia. Too often, the media ignores the broader scientific consensus on the safety and validity of trans identities. The BBC has directly and indirectly fed unfounded hysteria against trans people, vilifying them as threats to women within their own journalism. When they were called out for the bias, they failed to respond adequately. They have also twice apologized for calling J.K. Rowling — a woman who compared the “trans movement” to the Harry Potter series’ stand-in for the Nazis — transphobic. Sources like the New York Times and Washington Post are less overt about written — in the words of NPR’s public editor — “a fairly sophisticated false equivalency because it suggests that there is an equal level of both support and doubt about puberty blockers among the medical experts with the most knowledge about treating children with gender dysphoria.” In giving such fringe opinions the same weight as doctors’ broader consensus, news outlets are dishonestly reporting on issues that could have a real impact on people. When that media controls 90 percent of what the general public sees, this dishonesty has real consequences for the people living the identities caught in the middle of political battles.
These corporations claim to be impartial, but their centrism has only come to mean support for a status quo that both reinforces the power of their stakeholders and propagates misinformation that has real-world, harmful consequences. When a news outlet claims it isn’t taking sides, it’s really just looking after its own interests, which — in literally nine out of every ten cases — align with the interests of the very wealthy, and, consequently, the political right-wing.
Lastly, I want to emphasize that most of the outlets I’ve mentioned in this article regularly conduct quality reporting. Many employees at these news corporations have expressed their concern, such as the open letter to the New York Times, which highlighted the newspaper’s anti-trans bias. It’s just that the impartiality — or, rather, self-interest shrouded by a veneer of impartiality — embraced by certain articles and writers has had a detrimental effect on the quality of reporting and a harmful impact on many of the individuals who consume it.
Impartiality may be a noble ideal for reporting to aspire to — but in its current application, it serves as little more than a pretext for corporate news outlets to promote their own political and economic interests, often at the expense of their consumers and the people around them. There must be a level of responsibility and accountability that comes with having a platform that encompasses the vast majority of the news market. If we want to see change, we need to show these corporations that their harmful, faux-impartial rhetoric has no place among credible media.
