Why the Media Keeps Putting Liars on the Same Stage as Experts

There is a practice in American journalism that has done more to destroy public understanding of reality than any propaganda campaign, any conspiracy theory, or any social media algorithm. It is practiced every day, on every major network, by journalists who believe they are doing their jobs correctly.

They put a liar on screen next to an expert and call it balance.

One person has decades of research behind them. The other has a talking point funded by the industry that benefits from the lie. The journalist puts them in matching chairs, gives them equal time, asks them each to make their case, and lets the audience decide.

The audience does decide. They decide that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Because that is what the format taught them to believe.

There is now experimental proof that this format does not inform people. It destroys their ability to tell the difference between facts and lies.

What Rapp Found

In 2022, psychologist David Rapp at Northwestern University, along with his colleague Megan Imundo, published three experiments testing what happens when people are exposed to false balance reporting about climate change.

The design was precise. Participants read articles about climate change. Some articles presented only the scientific consensus: human activity is driving global warming and the evidence is overwhelming. Other articles presented the same scientific consensus alongside a contrarian view that climate change is either not real, not man-made, or not a significant problem. Equal space. Equal treatment. Both sides.

The results across all three experiments were consistent. Participants who read the falsely balanced articles showed significantly reduced belief in the scientific consensus. Their perception of how severe climate change is dropped. Their sense of how important it is to act dropped. The mere presence of the contrarian view, given equal platform, was enough to undermine decades of scientific agreement in the reader’s mind.

The format did the damage. Not the content of the contrarian argument. Not the quality of the evidence behind it. The format itself, the visual and structural equality of the two positions, told the reader’s brain that this is a legitimate debate between two reasonable positions.

It is not. Ninety-seven to ninety-nine percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is driving global warming. Putting one scientist next to one denier and calling it a debate tells the audience it is a 50-50 split. Rapp said it plainly: if 99 doctors told you that you needed surgery to save your life and one disagreed, you would listen to the 99. But the media keeps presenting it as though the split is even.

Why the Brain Falls for It

The reason false balance works is not that people are stupid. It is that the brain uses format as a shortcut for evaluating credibility.

When two people are placed on screen in matching chairs with matching microphones and given equal time by a journalist who treats them both with equal seriousness, the brain receives a structural signal: these two positions are equivalent. They are both worth considering. The truth is probably somewhere between them.

This is a cognitive shortcut that works perfectly in most situations. When two reasonable people disagree about a genuinely ambiguous question, the truth often is somewhere in the middle. The brain learned this shortcut because it is usually right.

But false balance exploits that shortcut by placing a position with zero evidence into the same structural frame as a position with overwhelming evidence. The brain reads the format, not the footnotes. It registers two voices, two chairs, two sides. And it splits the difference.

Rapp’s research showed that this is not a matter of education or intelligence. The format effect operates on everyone. The structural equality of the presentation overrides the informational inequality of the content. You can know, intellectually, that one side has all the evidence. But the format keeps telling your brain that both sides deserve consideration.

The History of the Problem

The false balance problem in American media did not start with Trump. It was documented two decades before he ran for office.

In 2004, Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff published a study in the journal Global Environmental Change analyzing climate coverage in the most influential American newspapers from 1988 to 2002. They examined the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

They found that 53 percent of articles about climate change gave roughly equal attention to the scientific consensus and to the contrarian position that human activity is not a significant cause of global warming. An additional 6 percent actually emphasized the contrarian view over the scientific consensus.

Boykoff and Boykoff called their study “Balance as Bias.” Their conclusion was devastating: adherence to the journalistic norm of balance had created informationally biased coverage. By treating a near-unanimous scientific consensus as a two-sided debate, the prestige press had created real political space for the government to delay action on climate change.

The journalistic norm of fairness, the very thing reporters believed made them credible, was the mechanism destroying public understanding of the issue.

Why They Keep Doing It

If false balance has been documented as harmful since at least 2004, and experimentally proven to reduce public understanding since 2022, why does every major network still do it?

There are three reasons, and none of them have anything to do with informing the public.

The first is legal protection. A network that presents “both sides” is harder to accuse of bias. Bias accusations are commercially dangerous. Advertisers flee fro