[...] the practice of impartiality has several inescapable consequences.

(1) It leads broadcasting into the impasse of a false symmetry of issues. All controversial questions must have two sides, and the two sides are usually given a rough equality in weight. Responsibility is shared out between the parties: each side receives a measure of praise or censure. This symmetry of oppositions is a formal balance: it has little or no relevance to the quite unequal relative weights of the case for each side in the real world. If the workman asserts that he is being poisoned by the effluence from a noxious plant, the chairman must be wheeled in to say that all possible precautions are now being taken.… This symmetrical alignment of arguments may ensure the broadcaster’s impartiality, but it hardly advances the truth. Opposition has been neutralized in this maneuver: the political level and the class content of the conflict have been suppressed.