Is "He Said, She Said, We're Clueless" Coverage Dying?

Jay Rosen has an interesting post about "on the one hand, on the other hand" journalism, and credits my 2004 CJR article which was one early contribution to critiquing this form of reporting. (Jesus, I've been doing this for too long.) There's a reason the critique of false "balance" emerged, in significant part, from the science journalism world. In CJR, I was very much channeling the complaints of many evolutionary and climate scientists, who were outraged by media coverage and continually pointed out that since there's no such thing as "balance" in science, reporting about science which employs such a paradigm often gets the story completely wrong. Indeed, such reporting empowers anti-science voices, who continually demand that their outlier stances be treated on a par with scientific consensus positions. Anyways, Rosen explains the advantages of "he said, she said" from the journalistic perspective--basically, it saves a reporter from the trouble ...