MSNBC Host: It is Too “Dangerous” To Cover Both Sides Of A Story

This article contains some commentary which could be considered opinion.

MSNBC reporter Mehdi Hasan said that it was “deeply dangerous” for a news source to cover “both sides” of a piece of news in an interview with Ben Smith, the co-founder of Samafor. Smith was one of the people who conducted the interview.

His statements run against the conventional journalistic values of fairness and impartiality, yet they are becoming more and more popular in circles around the media, which, ironically, is increasingly happening on both right and left wing media. Impartiality is all but gone in the media these days.

“There are two words we need to remove from our media vocabulary right now and that is ‘both sides,’” Hasan said.

“This fundamental crutch, this reliance on ‘both sides’ as a kind of lazy way of covering our political moment is deeply dangerous.”

“There are a bunch of major issues on which there are not both sides,” he continued. “There are not both sides on climate change. There are not both sides on white supremacy. There are not both sides to democracy. Ben, there are not both sides on the Holocaust.”

“On the big issues of our time, on whether people should be able to vote, on whether they should be able to get to a ballot box, on whether one party should be able to overturn elections, no there are not both sides.”

While he does make a point that on some issues this may apply, like those of obvious human rights abuses, one can see that this line of thinking can bleed over into other important stories that deserve to be looked at from all angles, as the truth is almost always complex and is never one sided, which can be dangerous for journalistic integrity. What do you think?