False balance is a centuries old English phrase, found (for example) in the King James Bible to indicate a dishonest measurement.
Today, false balance is used to describe a perceived or real media bias

Media bias

Media bias refers to the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the...

, where journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence actually supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may even actually suppress information which would establish one side's claims as baseless.

An example of issues sometimes handled with false balance are pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

, as when a national nightly news program in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 gave coverage to a backyard inventor who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion

Perpetual motion

Perpetual motion describes hypothetical machines that operate or produce useful work indefinitely and, more generally, hypothetical machines that produce more work or energy than they consume, whether they might operate indefinitely or not....

 machine; the program presented scientific authorities to explain why such a device was impossible, but since they gave equal time to the claims of the inventor, it may have created a false impression with audiences that his claims were credible, although they were not. “Objective coverage” of lynching

Lynching

Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...

 in the 1890s by US journalists failed, "to recognize a truth, that African-Americans were being terrorized across the nation."
False balance is often found in political reports,
company press releases and general information from organisations with special interest groups in promoting their respective agendas.

Other recent examples of false balance in reporting on science issues include the hot topics of man-made vs. natural climate change

Climate change

Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...

, the relation between Thiomersal and autism

Thiomersal controversy

The thiomersal controversy describes claims that vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thiomersal contribute to the development of autism and other brain development disorders...

and evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 vs. intelligent design

Intelligent design

Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...

.
For instance, although the scientific community overwhelmingly attributes a component of climate change of the last 50–100 years, particularly global warming

Global warming

Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...

, to the effects of the industrial revolution

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...

,
there are a handful
of scientists who dispute this conclusion. Giving equal voice to scientists on both sides makes it seem like there is a hearty debate within the scientific community, even though there is actually an overwhelming consensus.

False balance can sometimes originate from similar motives as sensationalism

Sensationalism

Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers...

, where producers and editors may feel that a story portrayed as a contentious debate will be more commercially successful to pursue than a more accurate account of the issue. However, unlike most other media biases, false balance may actually stem from an attempt to avoid bias; producers and editors may confuse treating competing views fairly — i.e., in proportion to their actual merits and significance — with treating them equally, giving them equal time to present their views even when those views may be known beforehand to be based on false information.

Examples from the issue of global warming

A study conducted by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff found that in the case of global warming, for example, a much more apparent consensus within the scientific community had been reached than the media made it seem. NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988 that he was “99 percent certain” burning fossil fuels was one of the factors that caused temperatures to rise. That same year, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), which went on to produce a steady stream of reports supporting Hansen’s claim that humans are contributing to global warming. Yet, while over 3,500 articles on global warming appeared between 1988 and 2002 just in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, 53 percent of these stories gave roughly equal attention to scientists who expressed views that global warming was caused by humans as they did to those who said global warming was caused by nature.

Jules and Maxwell Boykoff use the lead paragraph of a 1992 front-page article from The Los Angeles Times, as an example:

The ability to study climatic patterns has been critical to the debate over the phenomenon called "global warming." Some scientists believe—and some ice core studies seem to indicate—that humanity's production of carbon dioxide is leading to a potentially dangerous overheating of the planet. But skeptics contend there is no evidence the warming exceeds the climate's natural variations.

This paragraph puts scientists against skeptics, as though both are on equal grounds of knowledge, when in reality the scientists (even in 1992) have far more reason to believe that humanity is causing temperatures to rise than skeptics have to disagree. Additionally, putting “global warming” in scare quotes

Scare quotes

Scare quotes are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase to indicate that it does not signify its literal or conventional meaning.- History :Use of the term "scare quotes" appears to have arisen at some point during the first half of the 20th century...

 implies that the phrase is lacking in legitimacy.

External links

• "Finding Fault on Both Sides Can Be False Balance" by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
  Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
  Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting is a progressive media criticism organization based in New York City, founded in 1986.FAIR describes itself on its website as "the national media watch group" and defines its mission as working to "invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity...
  
  
• "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
  Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
  Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting is a progressive media criticism organization based in New York City, founded in 1986.FAIR describes itself on its website as "the national media watch group" and defines its mission as working to "invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity...
  
  
• "Goodbye to false balance over vaccines and autism! May you stay gone!" by "Orac"