Note to my friends in the media: The more you focus on the narrative that speech is 'left' or 'right' (when talking about diversity of speech), the more left and right it becomes.

The way you are talking about this causes it to polarize even more.

Instead of talking about 'left of right' speech, we should talk about it as the quality of speech.

What we want is a diverse set of quality inputs. That's a completely different thing.

I can illustrate it like this:

We want to publish a diverse set of quality voices, but we should *never* provide a platform to people who make shit up.

If people want to make shit up, they can do that on their own blogs. As publishers, we must be the source of quality!

This is what I'm missing from the discussion I see these days. In the media industry, so many editors are arguing that we need to 'foster a debate' and 'expose people to different opinions, even those they don't like'.

I agree *IF* that is a quality voice.

But if what we do is this, where we on one side have fact-based quality information and on the other people who make shit up ... then we have failed as the press.

This is not 'balance'. This is just crap. This is telling our readers that we don't care about our job.

So when we talk about providing of 'diversity of opinions' ... remember this. It's not about just giving whoever shouts the loudest a platform for saying shit they just made up.

It's about the quality of voices. It's based on facts, and whether they can provide proof.

Also, remember that 'diversity of opinion' is very different from having a 'diversity of facts'.

Diversity of facts means that facts can be anything, and nothing is true. That's not how facts work.

So if we have the facts, then it must always outrank anyone's opinion.

We must never present someone's opinions next to the facts as if they are equals. They are not equals.

COVID-19 is a perfect example of this. The virus simply doesn't care what opinion people have about it. So we cannot cover COVID-19 from the basis of opinion.

This means that if someone says something about the virus, where they are just expressing their personal opinion devoid of any evidence ... then it's our job as press to say: "F**** you ... Go away!"

...and then focus our coverage on those who have something useful to say.

The point is that this has nothing to do with 'left vs. right' speech. I don't care what political side they are on. If they make shit up, they don't get published.

As a press, we must be the source of quality. And people have to earn being published by us.

This is what we need to do to turn things around. To stop the continuing polarization, the lack of trust, and the constant animosity we see everywhere.

It's not going to be solved overnight. But if we do this consistently, we can change the culture around news.