Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Greenwald on False Equivalencies


I wanted to link to this post by Glenn Greenwald not because of the example he is citing specifically but because of the point he is making generally.

It's admirable to want to apply the same standards to both sides, but straining to manufacture false equivalencies doesn't accomplish that; sometimes, honestly applying the same standards to each side will result in a finding that one side, at least in that regard, is actually worse. When that's the case, a person engaged in truly independent, non-ideological inquiry -- rather than the pretense of such -- will expressly acknowledge the imbalance, not concoct an equivalency where it doesn't exist.
He’s right. This is something I run into all the time, people always say “well, it’s both parties” and maybe they are right. Maybe there is little difference in kind. But even so, there is a huge difference in degree. I genuinely attempt to be as intellectually honest as a person can be. If I look at all the relevant information and make a well reasoned judgment, that judgment isn’t ideological by default just because it comes down definitively in one camp or another.