Bothsidesism
A reader's summary of the media-criticism term for treating two sides of a dispute as equally credible regardless of where the evidence actually sits — its academic root in a 2004 study of climate-change coverage, a 1974 newspaper column that used the word decades before it caught on, and why the accusation is as contestable as the practice it names.
The term at a glance
Bothsidesism is the habit of presenting both sides of a disagreement as equally reasonable, equally weighted, or equally deserving of airtime, even when the underlying evidence, expert consensus, or facts on the ground clearly favor one side over the other. It is distinct from ordinary balanced reporting on a genuinely open question: the accusation is reserved for cases where “giving both sides their say” ends up misrepresenting how lopsided the actual dispute is.
Origin
The underlying practice long predates the word for it. Journalism's professional norm of “balance” — quoting a source on each side of a controversy rather than asserting a conclusion outright — developed as a defense against charges of bias, and works well when a controversy is genuinely contested. The term used to criticize its overreach has its own quieter history: the earliest documented appearance of “bothsideism,” per etymological research into newspaper archives, is Jim Dance's October 7, 1974 Minority Retort column in the Miami Herald, already deployed against coverage that split attention evenly between sides of unequal weight. The coinage then went largely unused for decades, surfacing again in scattered media criticism before climbing sharply in usage from around 2016 onward.
History and context
The academic case against the practice arrived well before the popular word did. Geographers Maxwell T. Boykoff and Jules M. Boykoff published “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press” in Global Environmental Change in 2004, coding 636 US newspaper articles on climate change published between 1988 and 2002 in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. They found that 52.7% gave the small minority of scientists disputing human-caused warming roughly equal footing with the much larger scientific consensus affirming it, arguing that the journalistic norm of “balance” had itself introduced a bias by producing a public picture of the science far more divided than the science actually was. Around the same period, press critic Jay Rosen was naming the broader posture underneath the practice: borrowing philosopher Thomas Nagel's phrase “the view from nowhere,” Rosen argued in a November 2010 PressThink post that American political journalism earns trust by refusing to sound like it is standing anywhere at all — a stance that can look like even-handedness on a genuinely open question and look like evasion on a settled one. The vernacular label caught up with both arguments over the following decade: Paul Krugman was using “bothsidesism” in print by 2016, and press critics reached for it more often through the Trump era, when moments like the August 2017 Charlottesville rally coverage turned the choice to frame a statement as one of two legitimate sides into a recurring, closely watched editorial decision rather than a background habit.
Main ideas
It starts as a virtue, not a flaw
Giving each side of a genuine dispute a fair hearing is ordinary journalistic practice, built to keep reporters from smuggling their own opinion into a factual account. Bothsidesism names what happens when that same habit gets applied to a question where the evidence isn't actually split fifty-fifty — treating a settled or lopsided matter as if it still had two comparably credible sides.
Boykoff and Boykoff put a number on it
Geographers Maxwell and Jules Boykoff coded 636 US newspaper articles on climate change from 1988 to 2002 across the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. They found 52.7% gave roughly equal voice to the small minority of scientists disputing human-caused warming and to the much larger scientific consensus affirming it — a professional norm of "balance" producing what their 2004 paper in Global Environmental Change called "a disjuncture between popular discourse and scientific discourse."
The word is older than its fame
The earliest documented use of "bothsidesism" (as "bothsideism") traces to Jim Dance's October 7, 1974 "Minority Retort" column in the Miami Herald, already aimed at media coverage that split its attention evenly between sides of unequal weight. The coinage sat largely unused for decades before returning to wider circulation.
Jay Rosen named the stance behind the habit
Press critic Jay Rosen borrowed philosopher Thomas Nagel's phrase "the view from nowhere" to describe a broader journalistic posture: reporters signaling trustworthiness by refusing to sound like they're standing anywhere at all, even on questions where the facts point clearly one way. His November 2010 PressThink post, "The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers," laid the argument out for readers pushing back on it.
Political coverage gave the word its vivid cases
Columnists including Paul Krugman were using "bothsidesism" in print by 2016, and usage climbed further as press critics reached for a one-word label during the Trump era, when disputes over how to frame statements like the August 2017 Charlottesville remarks turned "treat this as one of two legitimate sides" into a recurring, high-stakes editorial choice rather than a background habit.
Critique
- Telling it apart from ordinary caution takes a judgment call. Every open question deserves balanced coverage; the accusation only applies once a dispute has stopped being open, and reasonable people can disagree, in real time, about how settled a given question actually is.
- The label can dismiss a real minority position rather than a false one. Calling coverage “bothsidesism” presumes the accuser already knows which side the evidence favors — a presumption that is often right but is itself contestable, especially on questions where consensus is still forming rather than settled.
- Boykoff and Boykoff measured one field at one moment. Their 52.7% figure describes US prestige-press climate coverage from 1988 to 2002 specifically; it is frequently generalized into a timeless indictment of “the media” well beyond the topic, outlets, and years the study actually covered.
Impact
“Bothsidesism” is now standard shorthand in media criticism for false equivalence in coverage, and it sits close to two other entries in this series that describe related editorial distortions: Sanewashing, which describes a single statement being rendered more reasonable than what was actually said, and Whataboutism, which deflects from a claim rather than reframing its opposition as equally legitimate. All three name real editorial and rhetorical failure modes while depending on a reader's or critic's own judgment about where the evidence actually sits.