Working hard or hardly working?

Journalism -- mainstream media or otherwise -- does a disservice not only to the public but to itself when it mistakes what it believes to be balance for substance. The mainstream media, of course, has long been all about this thing it calls "balance." So-called balance was and is the way newspapers in monopoly markets cover their asses.

Call them to complain about bad or slanted coverage of anything, and they will invariably, at some point, give you this line: "Well, we reported both sides of the story." Some reporters are such simpletons they actually believe this nonsense. Those with intelligence know it's a farce.

Few things in life are so simple as to have only two sides, but other things in life are undeniably one-sided. I admit to a bias here. Most of my education came in the field of science, not journalism, and science is all about finding one side, the right side.

Were it not for the scientific belief in one-sidedness, we'd still be flipping a coin on whether to treat illness with modern drugs or leeches; the human lifespan would be about half of what it is today; and birthrates would still be held down by the continued deaths of significant numbers of babies at birth or shortly thereafter.

All of these things changed because medicine adopted that supposedly terrible, one-sided approach to reality. All science does this. What applies to medicine holds true in engineering, aviation and a whole myriad of other fields.

Which is not to say there are no dissenting opinions. Open and constant questioning of ideas is another fundamental of science. It is a necessary part because some of the things we know as "facts" today are going to turn out to be as wrong in the future as the idea the earth is flat turned out to be wrong in the past. As a regular voice of dissent myself over the years, I appreciate contrarians for what they should be -- people who make us think about what we know or think we know.

Unfortunately, some of my journalistic colleagues don't seem to care much about the thought part. They are bound, like so many bureaucrats, only to a standard. Thus the substance of the "other side" doesn't matter; all that matters is that journalists find the "other side." Were they in medieval times reporting the debate about the shape of the earth, these journalists would likely find someone to argue it is not flat.

It is unlikely they would bother to find someone to explain that it appears the earth might be round because when a ship sails off to sea you witness first the disappearance of the ship's hull over the horizon and then slowly but steadily the disappearance of the mast and sails as if the ship were going over a hill.

Your average reporter would not seek out the person able to make this argument for the earth as a globe because a.) it would require doing more than phoning the easiest available spokesperson for the other side (whatever the other side might be), and because b.) all this stuff about watching a ship would be perceived as too complicated for you, the average reader, to understand.

Newspapers have long operated on the idea of trying to make the news understandable to a sixth-grader, but not a smart sixth-grader. Most news is written to appeal to a sixth-grader who still reads at the first-grade level. All of which brings me to the big hoopla the Anchorage newspaper has made of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race finally staging an event without a dog death.

This is, indeed, a milestone, and we should all be happy. An Iditarod without a dog death is a cause for celebration, but we should not lose sight of reality. Dogs are short-lived creatures. They have an average lifespan a fraction of ours. Statistically, the odds are high that any time a large number of dogs are together in any one place for a couple weeks time, as is the case with the Iditarod, a dog or dogs are going to die.

The decade long average for the Iditarod is about three dog deaths a year. There were no deaths this year. There were an unusually high number last year -- six to be exact. Do the math here. Zero plus six divided by two and what do you get?

Yeah, three dead dogs in the past two Iditarods, right there at about the long-term average.