Traditional political and social-issues publications generally fall into two camps: those expressly and unashamedly oriented toward particular ideologies or special interests (e.g., The Conservative Chronicle, The Sierra Club), and those that attempt to achieve "ideological neutrality", or at least the image of such, through the doctrine of editorial balance (e.g., mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times). The doctrine of editorial balance is essentially that journalists and editors should "fairly" present different viewpoints from a "neutral" perspective. But often this doctrine devolves to the simplistic strategy of picking two opposing viewpoints and giving them roughly equal attention, trivializing complex issues into the black-and-white battle cries of the most vocal extremes while ignoring middle-ground or orthogonal alternatives, and making the two chosen sides appear equally credible even when they are in fact highly unequal in prevalence or plausibility [Boykoff04, Cohen05]. Further, since editorial balance fundamentally depends on the subjective judgments of journalists, and those subjective judgments are in turn judged subjectively by the public at large, there is really no objective way for anyone to test whether a given article is or is not in fact "balanced." So the Right wails about the media's liberal bias while the Left lambasts it as a conservative mouthpiece, public confidence in the media in general plummets [Healy05, Posner05], and their readership divides into increasingly polarized ideological worlds [Sunstein01, Krebs04].
In place of the inherently subjective notion of editorial balance, the Full Gamut pursues the fundamentally different goal of representative balance, inspired by the basic ideas of representative democracy. The goal of representative balance is not to ensure that each individual article published in the journal is "balanced" or "unbiased" in itself, but instead to ensure that the publication as a whole accurately and proportionately represents all significant viewpoints through a selection of articles from many different sources. Broad-based perspectives get the most space and prominence, while also leaving room for minority viewpoints to be aired in unfiltered and uncensored form. While traditional publications stake an article's claim to legitimacy on the mere fact of its publication, the Full Gamut accompanies each published article with statistics reflecting its actual measured breadth of support among the Full Gamut's volunteer editorship, providing accurate information not only about what people are thinking but also about how many people think that way.
In pursuing the goal of representative balance, we make no claim that the most widespread viewpoint is necessarily right, only that giving space to articles representing different viewpoints in proportion to their support base is at least fair in an objective, quantifiable, and democratically legitimate sense. And while representative balance is The Full Gamut's primary goal, editorial balance still plays a secondary role through the Full Gamut's deliberative article selection process. If one proposed article addresses several sides of an issue in a way that the volunteer editors widely perceive to be fair and unbiased, for example, while other competing proposals appeal only to particular smaller factions, then the single unbiased article is much more likely to be selected, and will receive greater prominence, than any of the more biased alternatives. In other words, editorial balance can still serve as an important factor in how the the publication's editorship subjectively judges the overall quality of proposed articles.