Equal Airtime Made False Claims Look Reasonable

Edward Stourton died last week at 68. The tributes arrived as they do for long-serving public figures—steady, responsible, a journalist of integrity.

He hosted Radio 4's Today programme for a decade and shaped it into something close to the national conscience—the place where politicians know they will be held to account. But the consensus that gathers around such deaths often obscures the actual argument the person's career embodied.

For Stourton, that argument was this. What does neutrality look like when the two sides of a question don't bring equal evidence? The Today programme operates under a specific doctrine of balance—not balance proportional to what the evidence supports. Balance as arithmetic.

Give the proponent and the skeptic equal time. Ask the same number of questions. Maintain visible symmetry. It feels fair.

Stourton was not unique in this. Every editor of the Today programme has navigated the same logic. But he embodied it during a decade when the stakes were highest. He leaves behind an institution that still treats the symmetrical treatment of claims as the highest form of journalistic virtue, even when the claims themselves are not symmetrical. When you insist on balance between positions that aren't balanced, you're not being neutral—you're making an editorial choice and calling it principle.

Watch yourself doing this. In meetings, in arguments, in how you weight competing claims. The assumption of equal weight protects you from having to decide. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.