Can Journalistic "False Balance" Distort Public Perception of Consensus in Expert Opinion?

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.