No, but if there are opinion articles for both sides, it will create a more informed reader. Newspapers should provide enough information for readers to be able to make their position on the information alone
Right, that’s the classic neutral source model: report what the person on the left thinks, report what the person on the right thinks, and expect the informed reader to make their own decision, which will probably be somewhere in the middle.
That model worked fine when people had things in common other than their views on policies, and could politely agree to disagree on many things. But it’s another matter altogether when both sides literally think the other side is trying to destroy America. If you have a paper that tries to show “both sides“ of issues that illicit opinions from OAN, Newsmax, Fox and literal Chinese state propaganda and put it next to commentary by people like Ezra Klein you just wind up with a publication that is intellectually incoherent.
The “both sides“ model of reporting assumes that both sides exist on the same planet and share a basic understanding of the axioms of reality. And they don’t anymore. Any publication that attempts to do this is just going to elicit outrage from both sides on a routine basis. And the NYT frequently does now. Nobody who supports BLM he’s going to feel “informed“ by an editorial by Tom Cotton about how troops should be called in on protesters, and vice versa.
That model worked fine when people had things in common other than their views on policies, and could politely agree to disagree on many things. But it’s another matter altogether when both sides literally think the other side is trying to destroy America. If you have a paper that tries to show “both sides“ of issues that illicit opinions from OAN, Newsmax, Fox and literal Chinese state propaganda and put it next to commentary by people like Ezra Klein you just wind up with a publication that is intellectually incoherent.
The “both sides“ model of reporting assumes that both sides exist on the same planet and share a basic understanding of the axioms of reality. And they don’t anymore. Any publication that attempts to do this is just going to elicit outrage from both sides on a routine basis. And the NYT frequently does now. Nobody who supports BLM he’s going to feel “informed“ by an editorial by Tom Cotton about how troops should be called in on protesters, and vice versa.