Resolved: Governments should impose a BBC-style impartiality requirement on all news platforms.

Pro argues that we need to avoid bias in news media. Con concedes this. Expanding on that, Pro offers in R2 that it affected the COVID-19 response. This is a great start to an argument, especially when taken together, but it still lacks in two areas: solvency and impact. I'll focus on solvency when I get to Con's case, but on impact, it pays to spell out what the actual harm of this bias is. Just saying that there have been two different schools of thought on the pandemic doesn't tell me what that actually results in as a concrete harm. Con grants you a lot of your internal links, which means he grants how effective media bias can be in shifting opinions. Work with that. Tell me why shifting opinion on COVID-19 led to a serious harm for society at large. It doesn't require a lot of explanation, and it establishes a basis for why a given truth about COVID-19 being undermined is so harmful.

Con's argument, meanwhile, comes with a serious amount of storytelling as he explains two important principles that drastically affect Pro's solvency: masking and the impact of neutrality. The masking point, in particular, is something Pro had to address in order to establish that this requirement has teeth, and I don't see any effective response. Companies will work within the requirements to keep shilling for their side of the political aisle, and realistically, their rhetoric won't change beyond the introduction of a token "opponent" to be included in discussions. Many news outlets already do this. Responding with "people are biased now" only tells me that little, if anything, will change post-implementation. What's more, since this is masking, it provides an air of legitimacy to their actions that previously didn't exist. Now, these companies are following the protocols, so they must be impartial by the government's standards. That's a net negative when both sides recognize that bias is non-unique. I don't see any responses to this.

But Con takes it a step further. He also argues that anything that is excluded as "biased" is a loss we can ill afford, essentially turning news media into mouthpieces of the majority parties to the exclusion of critical views. While it's not given as a direct response, to Pro's point on COVID-19 could be seen as a response, with Pro arguing that some of those critical views are net harmful. Still, that would be me stretching Pro's argument to places he doesn't use it, and even if I did, it would also mean adding missing pieces, like a clear set of harms that establish certain views of COVID-19 and the responses to it as net harmful. And if that were all the case, I would still have to balance that against a more existential and wide reaching harm that Con sets out: the availability of critical arguments is the only means by which the biases that both sides decry can be adequately challenged. Con is effectively arguing that Pro is increasing bias towards more centrist viewpoints and nixing outliers. If bias is paramount, and it's unclear that more extreme viewpoints are necessarily harmful, then this is reason enough to vote Con.

There are two pieces of offense from Pro I could vote on.

First, Pro argues that news platforms without impartiality requirements often function as echo chambers, thus reducing people’s ability to access information (as they’re only engaging with one viewpoint, rather than coming to the truth themselves) and increasing the likelihood they’re presented with misinformation (e.g., because if one political ideology has anti-vaxx views, they never hear the pro-vaccine perspective).

Con has two responses. (1) He points out that objectivity is often used as an excuse to give large amounts of coverage to viewpoints that align with a platform’s political views (e.g., Fox covering election lies by arguing it’s giving due weight to multiple opinions). I don’t think this is actually an offensive argument from Con -- Fox could use this excuse even without the impartiality requirement, so it’s unclear why requiring impartiality makes things worse -- but I do think it shows that biased media platforms can find ways to present information in biased ways, such as uncritically presenting non-fringe but factually incorrect views, even under BBC’s standard, thus mitigating Pro’s argument. (2) He points out that the public has an active preference for biased news, with a bunch of evidence for this in Round 3. I think he doesn’t quite enough work here (since if a news organization is currently *only* covering anti-vaxx views, it would be *forced* to cover both now, even if a news organization that is currently only covering pro-vaxx views is also forced to cover both), but I buy that he at least proves that media organizations will look for ways out, and will often succeed (consider his examples of Fox News picking their quotes of opposing viewpoints selectively, or choosing not to cover more compelling criticisms of their viewpoints). So I don’t think Con beats this argument entirely, but I do think he mitigates it.

Second, Pro tries to turn Con’s claim on elitism by arguing that for-profit companies have strong incentives to present viewpoints that appeal to them. I don’t think Con does a great job addressing this turn directly, but I think this turn is insufficiently explained -- as Con points out, the public wants polarized news anyway, and Pro doesn’t explain why an impartiality requirement would solve for the problem of for-profit companies controlling the content of news media (nor why, indeed, the fact that you own a news company means its content is entirely in your interests).

In the end, I think the forfeits hurt Pro’s ability to respond to Con’s offense equally. For instance, Con argues that criticism of particular dominant viewpoints is likely to be shut down as impartial, and that news organizations “index” a narrow set of mainstream views and primarily cover them (including the BBC), thus shutting out views that are less mainstream and not controlled by elites, with lots of evidence for this claim. At the outset, there are two major problems with this, that Pro could have exploited had they not forfeited. First, this argument is not comparative -- I’m not clear why indexing becomes worse with an impartiality policy (a lot of Con’s evidence applies to media platforms in the US right now, where this requirement does not exist). Second, Con never quite explains why criticism of dominant news by media organizations is likely, common, and influential in the status quo (which is Con’s alternative). But neither of these problems matters if Pro doesn’t make these responses -- and I’m able to buy, to some extent, that these problems are worse with the BBC, and Pro doesn’t successfully address indexing specifically. Similarly, Con gets some offense from (1) the idea that a *sheen* of objectivity makes criticism of news organizations that uncritically air widely-held false information (like voter fraud in 2020) harder and (2) the claim that, in some cases, this would make misinformation worse as you’d be forced to air and give weight to widely-held views that are false.

Since Con is able to show that media organizations will have incentives to be biased, and will find ways to be biased anyway, I think his benefits of critiquing the status quo, the sheen of objectivity, and making misinformation worse are just larger. So due to Pro’s forfeits, I’m pretty much forced to vote Con.