I’m not usually one for New Year’s Resolutions (although I’ve made a few of my own this year, for a change), but there is one that I’d like to suggest for some of my professional colleagues: be better at your jobs. Worrying about the future, and their place in it, has replaced recreational boozing as the most popular pastime of the average journalist. How will the industry adapt to the influence of the internet, and what will that mean for their employment status and the likelihood of it continuing? But while these are legitimate concerns, we all might want to spend a little less time thinking about the future and a little more time thinking about the present. After all, if we continue to foul our professional nests the way we have over the past two decades or so, we’ll put ourselves out of business and out of a job long before the internet gets a chance to do it.

The coverage of the British Medical Journal’s highly unusual decision to formally renounce Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study that linked vaccinations with the development of autism in children illustrates of one of contemporary journalism’s worst flaws, the reflexive search for so-called balance in coverage. After all, short of a discussion about whether the Holocaust actually happened or not, the Wakefield case is as close to a slam-dunk as the media will get. On one side, you have a few b-list celebrities, the most outspoken of which is a former Playboy Playmate, and a noisy rabble of hyper-anxious mothers with far too much time on their hands and far too little education. On the other, you have virtually the entire scientific community – a community that isn’t naturally inclined towards consensus, either – supported by an overwhelming array of scientific data and evidence.

There’s no need, in other words, to meet the Wakefield study’s ludicrous conclusion with anything other than contempt. And yet, in a January 7 CBC Radio report on the subject, reporter Erin Collins opens the piece by presenting the relationship between vaccines and autism as a debatable one. The piece even includes an interview with Calgary naturopath Jennifer Nardella, an obvious attempt to “balance” out the conclusions of the scientists in the piece with a contradictory voice.

Whether reporters like Collins do this because they’ve been taught to or because they’re simply too lazy to do it any another way isn’t clear. But the motivation behind it isn’t clear, the practice itself is maddeningly common. Most journalists try to frame any issue that emits even a passing whiff of controversy by giving equal coverage and equal space to both sides of the story. This is, we’re told, the objective approach. The journalists provide the information, and the public gets to decide where it stands.

But what about those issues on which both sides of the story don’t deserve equal coverage? Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor at New York University, notes that the media has a much harder time with these sorts of situations. “The operating system for mainstream journalism knows what to do when there’s a legitimate debate to be had. But when there’s an illegitimate debate going on (and getting louder) that same system tends to break down, especially when the culture war and partisan divide are confounded with the issue.”

The supposed relationship between vaccines and autism would seem to be an illegitimate debate if there ever was one. The 1998 paper by Dr. Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors, and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. In an editorial that accompanied the edition of the BMJ that renounced Wakefield’s study, editor Fiona Godlee described it as “an elaborate fraud,” and suggested that the doctor’s work in other journals be re-examined for similar patterns of intellectual and academic abuse. And yet, in almost all of the coverage – save for Anderson Cooper’s impressive interview with Dr. Wakefield himself – the issue is treated as contestable.

Our job as journalists, I would submit, isn’t to mindlessly present both sides of every story, as seems to be the case in most circles today. Our job is to present the reading public with the best available information so that they can in turn make the best possible decisions with or about it. We should take care to avoid imposing our prejudices on our readers and on our work, but at some point we managed to confuse opinion with bias. Being objective doesn’t mean being relentlessly – and mindlessly – neutral on all things. It means being willing to assess the available evidence without resorting to preconceived notions or passing it through ideological filters. In some cases, as with the Wakefield study and the life-and-death consequences associated with continuing to perpetuate its deliberate falsehoods, we’re obligated to take a side, to have an opinion and to tell readers the way it is. As Jay Rosen writes, “what if choosing sides is exactly what the journalist would have to do to portray things as they really are?”