Fair and balanced.

“Fair and balanced” is best known not as an anonymous proverb but as a modern media slogan, most prominently associated with Fox News Channel’s branding beginning in the mid-1990s. It was used as a tagline to signal (and market) a claim of evenhanded reporting and commentary amid perceived partisan bias in U.S. television news. Because the phrase circulated heavily through advertising, on-air graphics, and public discourse rather than a single authored literary text, it is often repeated without attribution and can appear “anonymous” in quotation lists. Its cultural resonance is tied to debates about journalistic objectivity, framing, and the gap between stated neutrality and editorial practice.

On its face, the phrase asserts two ideals: “fair” suggests just treatment of subjects and audiences, while “balanced” implies presenting multiple sides in proportion. As a slogan, however, it also functions rhetorically: it pre-emptively positions the speaker or institution as trustworthy and implicitly casts rivals as biased. In media criticism, “balance” can be read as a contested standard—sometimes meaning genuine pluralism, other times a performative symmetry that can flatten differences in evidence or expertise. The phrase’s power lies in its simplicity: it compresses a complex ethical program for communication into a memorable, self-validating claim.