Okrent's Law

Daniel Okrent (1948-) is an American writer best known as the public editor of the New York Times. During his time as a journalist he coined "Okrent's Law", which basically sets out the fallacy of false balance. He noticed that the media often try to legitimise fringe viewpoints in an attempt to appear even-handed. In my experience, this is certainly true of the popular media today, particularly when it comes to setting up a false argument between science and pseudoscience.

Okrent's Law states:

"The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is just plain true".

Its a simple statement, but with fairly profound implications. In TOK we have to be careful that in setting up arguments and counter-arguments, each have not only equal weight, but are legitimate claims.