Roger Ailes at Fox started this. He made the whole concept of “balance” an inside joke among right-wing media. It’s the reason the preposterous slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” was so effective, both for recruiting conservative viewers and infuriating liberals. Ailes used to say: “The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.” Translation: you needed to pull hard the other way to achieve “balance” overall. “Fair and balanced,” in other words, was a rip on the idea that standard, dull, third-person New York Times–style media was already balanced. Twenty years
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