Once again, Glenn Greenwald is my hero. Greenwald writes in Salon about the notion that "centrism" and "balance" make an opinion good or correct. He argues that the tendency in the so-called mainstream media (The New York Times, CNN, et al.) to demand what they deem objectivity is detrimental to the debate going on:

When there is grave imbalance in political power, corruption or extremism -- as there has been for the last eight years, at least -- then those who preach balance and demand a centrist critique of everything are the ones who are mindless, misleading partisans. They demand centrist equivalencies as an ideology, regardless of whether those equivalencies are real.

He then offers several examples of book reviews in which the authors are criticized not for being wrong, but for being too one-sided. As Greenwald notes, none of these critics ever addresses the issue of the authors' facts.

The street goes both ways. President Bush insisted that the the other side of the story needs to be addressed when it comes to global warming, even though no credible scientific sources suggest that humans are not causing global climate change. State governments that want students to hear both sides of the story when it comes to evolution insist that evolution and intelligent design (or its parent, creationism) don't understand -- or refuse to admit, or wish to be intentionally deceptive regarding the fact -- that there is no scientist who does not believe in evolution.

Greenwald is right: there are times when the "there are two sides to the story" trope is wrong. The Bush administration has consistently broken the law. Period. There is no way to give them the benefit of the doubt. There is no way to come at the adminstration from the other side. They are unilaterally wrong. The notion that humans are not causing climate change is wrong. The notion that evolution is not real is wrong. And, says Greenwald, people shouldn't be afraid to say that.