Often times - in today's media one side will present the other sides case by only addressing some strawman arguments.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/26/why-does-u...
Another one is ground.news [1] which lets you compare multiple headline news articles from various sources together.
They give the writers full freedom, which makes it hard to get strict point counterpoint pieces like that. And many editors are averse to a simple "two sides" narrative.
Reading the opinion pages 30 years back everything was very different, but times have changed to where big name papers are mostly just the news shoehorned into a tidy bias confirming package. In many ways I respect what Bezos is doing because it entirely drops the farcical pretext of balance.
Many will claim NYT has been overly generous in regards to Trump leading up to the election, often choosing not to comment on Trump's more suspicious speech and interpreting his words in a gracious context. While others claim NYT is has an obvious left-wing bias.
The fact people can't even agree which way the bias goes demonstrates to me the bias is not as severe as those aforementioned people claim.
This is, by far, the most destructive issue with the trend of media spinning everything to conform to the biases of their target demographic.
We don't have too many op eds defending the flat earth theory anymore. Sadly I've seen too many friends fall down such rabbit holes.
It also takes a lot of energy and ink to continuously refute perspectives based solely on indoctrination, vibes, and straight up lies.
You have a ruinously optimistic outlook for the average human, let alone a flat-earther.
If you do that, you are telling anyone that just overviews the articles that both views have the same validity and that is just a manner of disagreements between peers, and that is falling into their trap, by doimg that you are actively working FOR the flatbearth cause, even if you want to feel "fair", ypu are just the useful idiot they need to keep spreading and legitimizing.
Flat earthers should no be given even a second unless it is to mock them, we have known that the earth is "round" for 2 millenia, we cannot keep discussing the same things over and over just because a bunch of narcisists want to feel like "the know better".
You'd need a really strong editor to be in charge of the review/revision/back-and-forth process, so they could cut out shenanigans like an author withholding their strongest argument, only to include it in their final version.
I'd probably have a rule that no new arguments could be introduced into an article, other than as a direct response to anything _new_ that the opponent author included in their prior revision.
edit because parent edited to talk about editor :): I think there needs to be transparency at the editorial level then, if the editor is making decisions they can write a reasoning behind each one and make it public.
No, they're infamously secretive. I think far too secretive, and that's a part that I don't think needs to be emulated.
While I do think there's value in having the drafting process "out of the public view" for an op ed, I'd agree in transparency after the fact. I could see just publishing all the revisions, editors notes, etc online alongside the actual final pieces.
I don't think the "out of public view" drafting makes a big difference around this. I actually think making the drafting and revision process public during the drafting would have more corrosive effects on the process. In that one side can push and set a narrative without the other side having opportunity to respond.
Anyway, I don't think any editorial system can be fully hardened against the editor leaving imprints of their viewpoints on the piece, but I think this approach would be significantly more transparent than the current state of play.
Any topic of current controversy, like vaccines, should have a counter. Even if you find it disagreeable.