Dear Media:

If I had to name your worst sin, it's that you often treat all "sides" of a debate as equally legitimate (or equally flawed), even when they are not.

While it's important to be objective, it's more important to tell the truth.

And the truth is, "bothsidesdoitism" elevates hokum (and, often, outright propaganda) to legitimacy, while simultaneously demoting earnest understanding into irrelevance.

You know, in your gut, that bothsidesdoitism is wrong. You do not, for trivial example, tell us that "opinions differ" about whether a rock will fall when a person drops it from a bridge.

Yet on many topics where the great majority of objective evidence supports one side, you persistently treat all sides as equally legitimate.

In this vein, let's review the New York Times's 6/4/2017 piece "How G.O.P. Shifted on Climate Science", subtitled: "Reversal Is a Story of Big Money and Democratic Hubris". [1]

The subtitle itself is a marvel of bothsidesdoitism, giving equal blame to "Big Money" and "Democratic Hubris". (And the title, by using "Shifted", also falsely implies that the GOP once generally favored action to minimize climate change).

But if you actually read the (105 paragraph!) article, you see that the authors concentrate almost exclusively on the central roles of Big Money and cynical political calculations in hardening the GOP against climate action.

The sole examples of "Democratic Hubris" are (1) That President Obama enacted his Clean Power Plan over the objections of Congressional GOPers; and (2) a selective quote from a Hillary Clinton speech. The authors even admit that climate action would "go nowhere in the Republican-majority Congress".

But instead of then discussing why Pres. Obama saw the issue as urgent enough to work around Congress, the authors tell us that "Obama [Fed] the Movement" of the GOP toward climate inaction. They then implicitly adopt the idea -- which is, at best, a conspiracy theory, and more likely just outright propaganda -- that Obama was "imperious, heavy-handed, pleasing to the elites on the East and West Coasts and in the capitals of Europe, but callous to the blue-collar workers of coal and oil country". Then, fully in blame-the-victim mode, the authors say that "Republicans who had supported the climate change agenda began to defect and have since stayed away".

So let's summarize. The real story, as about 95 of the authors' 105 paragraphs illustrate, is that:

(1) the GOP began as largely prone to avoiding climate action, with a few (probably largely rhetorical) exceptions, such as John McCain's professions during the 2008 campaign, which he's effectively recanted;

(2) the GOP saw political gold in opposing climate action;

(3) big-money interests pushed the GOP to oppose climate action; and

(4) climate action was dead in the GOP-dominated Congress.

Nonetheless, the authors "balanced" this condemning evidence with the nearly fact-free idea that Democrats' "hubris" drove Republicans away from climate action, giving the final impression that not only do bothsidesdoit, but Democrats actually do it worse than Republicans.

Orwell's pigs would squeal in joy.