Balance fallacy

From RationalWiki

“	There's a kind of notion that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who's been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn't have a debate with some ijit who removes his teeth with string and a door!	”
—Dara O'Briain

The fallacy of balance occurs when two sides of an argument are assumed to have equal value. Here, for instance, this is shown as a reporter giving equal time to people who believe the sun is hot and cold, and here we hear theories about broccoli and garden gnomes.

A real world example is the Discovery Institute's campaign for American schools to "Teach the Controversy" in science lessons, giving equal weight to the theory of evolution and intelligent design criticisms of it, although these criticisms are reliant on creationist religious views overwhelmingly discredited within the scientific community.

In American politics, this is sometimes referred to as "Broderism", after the Washington Post columnist who can never name a single thing Republicans have done wrong without dredging up one (often isolated, sometimes apocryphal) thing that Democrats have done wrong as well.

Articles about logical fallacies
Formal fallacies
Ad hominem	Argument by assertion	Negative proof	Non sequitur
Informal fallacies
Ad hoc	Argumentum ad nauseam	Argumentum ex culo	Argument from ignorance	Argument from incredulity	Balance fallacy
Begging the question	Correlation does not equal causation	Equivocation	False analogy	False dilemma	Moving the goalposts
No True Scotsman	One single proof
Red herrings
Argumentum ad baculum	Argumentum ad populum	Argument from adverse consequences	Association fallacy	Bullshit	Poisoning the well
My enemy's enemy	Spotlight fallacy	Straw man	Style over substance fallacy	Texas sharpshooter fallacy
Conditional fallacies
Argument from authority	Galileo gambit	Slippery slope
Fallacious argument styles
Chewbacca Defense	Gish Gallop	Ham Hightail	JAQing off