How “Balance” Has Come to Mean “More Conservative”

There has been an ongoing public discourse over things like cancel culture, political correctness, wokeness, critical race theory, etc. Both sides of the political spectrum see the other as using bad faith attacks to control the bounds of rational debate and push the other out of the public square.

Many of these discourses (at least to the extent that they originate from the Right) connect back to the idea that the major-fact finding institutions—academia and the free press—are “liberal,” or at least biased towards worldviews ranging from left-of-center to progressive. Conservatives often for call for a more “balanced” version of news or education that gives the conservative take equal weight as the liberal one.

As someone who has been both an academic and journalist, I have mixed feelings about the idea that these institutions are liberal. I won’t expound too much (I’m planning to write a long essay on this topic). Though it wouldn’t be fair to outright dismiss the plausibility to this idea, the conservative lens often turns factual statements into ideological ones. In both of these professions, there isn’t enough push to publicly and consistently explain that certain truths aren’t “in the middle” and that a “middle” presupposes that facts can’t exist outside of ideology. I also think these professions, especially journalism, have…