Media critics have expressed concern that journalistic “false balance” can distort the public’s perceptions of what ought to be noncontroversial subjects (e.g., climate change). I report several experiments testing the influence of presenting conflicting comments from 2 experts who disagree on an issue (balance condition) in addition to a complete count of the number of experts on a panel who favor either side. Compared with a control condition, who received only the complete count, participants in the balance condition gave ratings of the perceived agreement among the experts that did not discriminate as clearly between issues with and without strong expert consensus. Participants in the balance condition also perceived less agreement among the experts in general, and were less likely to think that there was enough agreement among experts on the high-consensus issues to guide government policy. Evidently, “false balance” can distort perceptions of expert opinion even when participants would seem to have all the information needed to correct for its influence.

Citizens in a democratic society are expected to have, and to express in polls, opinions on a broad array of complex topics, from health (should schoolchildren be required to be vaccinated?) to economics (would increasing the minimum wage decrease employment?) to foreign policy (would the Syrian people benefit from Western military intervention?). The typical member of the public, however, lacks the time, knowledge, and access to directly evaluate the relevant evidence on such issues. Instead, they must rely on the opinions of experts who have, in fact, evaluated the evidence. Members of the public, for that matter, do not typically interact directly with the experts, but rather learn about prevailing expert opinion through the news media (e.g., Wilson, 1995).

Journalists, then, play a crucial role in distilling and distributing expert opinion to the public. They face a quandary when, as is often the case, the experts themselves disagree in their interpretation of the evidence pertaining to an issue of interest to the public. In such situations, journalists...