Medical ALERT: Balanced News Causes Brain Damage

Balanced" news is making you stupid
by Allan Uthman

Last issue of The BEAST contained our annual “50 Most Loathsome People in America” list, by far our most popular feature. As always, once it hit the internet, it was unstoppable, and still pervades the “blogosphere” as I write this. E-mails are streaming in by the hundreds, and surprisingly enough, most are positive. But, of course, there are a lot of angry messages from conservatives, too, each giving us a piece of their mind, most of whom hardly seem able to spare it.

By far the biggest complaint is that old chestnut, liberal bias. Any list that doesn’t include Michael Moore, or Ted Kennedy, or Howard Dean, or Cindy Sheehan, etc., is obviously the product of partisan bias, they say. Of course, it seems kind of stupid to expect some kind of dispassionate ideological “balance” from this tiny biweekly, which is called, after all, The BEAST. But beyond that, the very idea that the list cannot be considered legitimate unless it contains the same number of Democrats as Republicans is just silly, a symptom of what I think is a national neurosis, a logical virus that infests modern political discourse in America. That virus is “balance,” or rather, the exaltation of balance, the glorification of balance, to the point that truth itself is subjugated or simply dismissed as unknowable, or nonexistent, or just plain irrelevant.

Syndicated columnist John Leo’s most recent piece, which actually cites the Loathsome List (though he calls us a “left blogger”), is a good example. Titled “The Left Now Joins the Right in Attacking Mainstream Media,” the column indicates, among other things, that Leo is incredibly out of touch with liberal thinking:

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