It’s the ABC’s job to be accurate and fair, not to chase the dangerous fallacy of ‘balance’

One of the oldest tropes in journalism is that it should be balanced; that journalists have a responsibility to present all sides of a given issue with equal weight. This view also holds that appearing to be critical of one side and sympathetic to another amounts to “bias”. That notion of balance sounds ideal. After all, journalists should be neutral observers who favour nobody, so if anybody feels as though their side is not presented with equal measure, the journalist has somehow…