The Balance Model

A couple of years back—more than I care to count, to be honest—I did a six-week stint filling in on air for the afternoon session on ABC Radio in Brisbane. It drove me nuts. It was a fun gig, and I learned a lot about audio recording and production, but it drove me nuts.

Balance was the problem. Or what I used to think of as bullshit balance. I roll my eyes at conservative try-hards lashing into the national broadcaster, accusing it of bias, because I’ve been there, and I’ve seen the contortions they wrench themselves into, not simply to avoid such accusations—they’re unavoidable—but because they are required by law to balance everything they put to air.

I suppose it’s a reasonable enough idea, since they’re publicly funded. If you get a careerist spokes-drone from one centrist party to fill in two minutes of dead air space, it’s only fair that you would invite a careerist spokes-drone from their rival party to fill up another two minutes.

That’s the theory, anyway.

It breaks down when it hits the reality of late-stage capitalism.

I think the rot really set in with climate change. Because a trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry refused to take responsibility for its role in killing us all, and because they had, like, a couple of trillion dollars lying around, they were able to fund an army of well-paid bullshit artists demanding equal time to make the case that they should be allowed to keep setting the planet on fire because it was very profitable and, well, that was enough, really.

When I was still a journalist, I used to think the appropriate take was the now-famous joke that if one person tells you it’s raining outside but another straight-up denies it, your job isn’t just to report both statements; it’s to stick your head out the fucking window and tell people what’s going on.

Perhaps a couple of years of worsening climate disasters have made this case to most of the corporate media, but they haven’t learned the lesson anywhere else.

Politics, as always, is the worst.

You see it here in the coverage of, say, Peter Dutton’s brainfart about nuclear power, which somehow morphed into Opposition policy. The Press Gallery reports on this disaster-in-waiting as a purely strategic or even tactical issue in the realm of electoral competition. Is it working for Dutton, or is it not? How will it affect these marginal seats? Does it shore up the party’s vote in rural and regional Australia?

A more interesting question, which will never be asked, might be: “Mr. Dutton, what is your plan for storing the spent fuel rods in 5,000 year’s time?”

Now, to be fair, I don’t imagine Dutts would have any trouble answering. He’d wave the question away. He’d smirk, he’d lie. Whatever it takes. But unless he was foolish enough to do an interview with Green Left Weekly or Renew Australia, he will never have to answer that question and the dozen difficult follow-ups it demands because nobody in the corporate media is ever going to stick their head out the window and tell us it’s raining outside—and the rain glowing a bright, eerie blue colour.

That’s not how they work.

That would be taking sides.

You see the same process at work in the US election. The Democrats are running a conventional campaign, offering a suite of policies that promise more or less continuity with the sort of stuff they have offered before. You can agree with them or not in good faith. You can even imagine, in good faith, that they’ll be utterly disastrous, socially, economically, geostrategically, whatever.

But their rival party is not conventional. It does not offer continuity.

The Republican Party has devolved into a febrile personality cult whose presidential candidate seems to have gone ever so slightly insane.

However, the old corporate media seems incapable of reporting this. The Balance Model, which more or less served them well since the emergence of mass media over a century ago, has failed in the face of a collapse in our shared reality. It is arguably no longer fit for purpose.

Weirdly, one of the drivers of that collapse, Rupert Murdoch, understood what was happening long before anybody else. Murdoch figured out that people would not pay for information on the internet. Why would you? Information is effectively free there.

But the meaning of that information? Especially if the information seems immediately, existentially threatening?

Meaning is not information. It is the lens through which we interpret information. It can magnify or distort. It can illuminate the truth or obscure it entirely, shaping perceptions, beliefs, and, ultimately, our decisions to act. Meaning is the narrative that connects disparate, atomised facts into a compelling story.

And here’s the kicker: it doesn’t even have to be coherent—just compelling.

That’s what Rupert Murdoch understood as he applied the lessons he’d learned from publishing tabloid shitsheets to building the much grander and more powerful machine we know as Fox News.

The Balance Model of commercial news media is still obsessed with coherence. But when faced with the delusional brain spasms of a malignant narcissist imploding in full public view, coherence is impossible (even if, on occasion, the spectacle is utterly compelling).

Yet, because the model demands that information be presented as both coherent and balanced, the media ends up skewing reality to fit this framework, imagining themselves as statistical mavens somehow correcting raw data to smooth out imbalances, outliers, and anomalies.

A phenomenon like Trump is a pure ‘out of context problem’ for the model – but not for Fox, because they’ve already context-shifted away from the problem.

Don’t explain the crazy, become the crazy.

For the old media, though, there is no way to balance the data or even acknowledge the crazy. In fact, as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein wrote all the way back in 2012, “a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.”

A lot of journalists think of it as an impossible problem to solve, but it’s really not.

The answer is simple.

Just do your fucking job.

Stick your head out the window and tell us whether it’s raining.