Fairness means listening to different perspectives and opinions. It does not always require giving equal weight or time to those different sides.

So how does this work in practice?

When people have genuine differences of opinion about an issue that has no right or wrong answer, a “both sides” approach is often warranted. Art, for example, is often subjective. If you’re producing a piece about a new abstract sculpture in a local park that has some residents upset, it’s entirely appropriate for the audience to hear from residents who like the sculpture and those who don’t.

There often are reasonable disagreements about an issue, and fairness requires presenting these disagreements in an evenhanded manner.

That is not the case when covering a topic that can scientifically be proven true or false. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said.

Let’s say your station decides to cover a local clean-up effort. After a severe storm, residents, businesses, and schools join forces to restore the area’s battered coastline. If the piece reports on the effects of climate change, fairness does not require giving equal coverage to those who deny climate change.

Doing so leads to false equivalence—making it appear that both sides of an argument have equal merit when one side relies on factual evidence and the other does not.

The scrutinizing of false equivalence is relatively new in journalism. At a time of “fake news” and intense media scrutiny, journalists sometimes feel pressure to present all sides of an issue to avoid being criticized or labeled as biased. But the industry is now pushing back against the idea of false balance.

“The problem with false equivalence as it permeates so much of the culture of media these days is that we’re just giving voice to things that have absolutely no basis in reality and treating them as equivalent to everything else,” former PBS Board Member Evan Smith said. “And it becomes a kind of ‘he said, he said,’ let’s leave it there.”

Smith, who is also the CEO and co-founder of The Texas Tribune, was on the committee that revised and updated the PBS Editorial Standards in 2018.

“We stick to facts and truth and reality,” Smith explained. “You can acknowledge that there are those, a smaller group who may disagree, but I don’t think you’re obligated to do more than that.”

Fairness, according to the PBS Editorial Standards, requires producers “to be open-minded when evaluating the merits and assessing the credibility of all opinions or viewpoints while also managing their own personal opinions and biases.” In other words, producers must rigorously evaluate the merits of various statements, even when those statements conflict with their own views. Importantly, however, “Fairness does not require that equal time be given to conflicting opinions or viewpoints.” If one statement is backed by evidence and one is not, fairness requires communicating that to the audience.

In heated elections, the principle of fairness especially holds true in politics.

Producers are responsible for presenting the facts and being fair to the people they’re covering. That doesn’t mean letting a politician say anything without going unchallenged.

“There is nothing wrong with calling a lie a lie,” Smith said. “There is everything wrong with letting it go unchallenged or unchecked. So, we in the business of journalism are in the business of truth. And facts. Those things matter.”

Contact Standards & Practices at standards@pbs.org