We’re all for balanced coverage and equal time for legitimate opposing viewpoints. But the American cable network C-SPAN has just taken this journalistic ideal to an illogical and downright immoral extreme.
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen notes that the public affairs channel had planned to broadcast a lecture by Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt. But producers then decided that in the interests of “balance,” they also had to give equal time to Holocaust denier David Irving, with whom Lipstadt had a court battle in London:
“We want to balance it [Lipstadt’s lecture] by covering him,” said Amy Roach, a producer for C-SPAN’s Book TV. Her boss, Connie Doebele, put it another way. “You know how important fairness and balance is at C-SPAN,” she told me. “We work very, very hard at this. We ask ourselves, ‘Is there an opposing view of this?'”
As luck would have it, there was. To Lipstadt’s statements about the Holocaust, there was Irving’s rebuttal that it never happened — no systematic killing of Jews, no Final Solution and, while many people died at Auschwitz of disease and the occasional act of brutality, there were no gas chambers there….
In the end, Lipstadt had to choose between promoting her own book — a terrific read, by the way — and giving Irving the audience of his dreams and a status equal to her own. C-SPAN said it was only seeking fairness, but it was asking Lipstadt to balance truth with a lie or history with fiction.
More on this on Lipstadt’s blog.
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