OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan Well, she's a Republican, so I guess I should default to simply disagreeing with her on the issues. But, in fact, I much more disagree with the conclusions she comes to.
First, though Bush's win was substantial, he also had more people vote for his opponent than had ever voted for a candidate in history as well. Any country where 49% of the people do not think you are the candidate who should win seems pretty deeply divided to me.
Second, as much as people love to paint the mainstream media as biased and wrong as many times as they were right, this is just a statistical aberration. Bloggers very rarely generated stories on their own; it was much more facilitating the quick transit of information and allowed the many eyes of the readers to do the deep analysis that reporters are normally responsible for. Second, the CBS memos were wrong, but how many times was CBS right? Being wrong 1% out of all the stories covered is not bad... it's probably not even new. People have been wrong since newspapers began; it's just now we have a thousand fact checkers at the ready. I absolutely believe the mainstream media will have to change to accommodate the phenomenon of having fact checkers at the ready but there's an inherent fallacy here that I do not think people who think that the mainstream media are doomed really understand. Does Ms. Noonan really think that at any time the press put on a story that they thought was false and expected it to pass? Does she think that people held stories for any reason other than for maximum publicity? There’s a sense of malice here that Ms. Noonan attributes to these news organizations that I do not think exists. It is this attribution of malice (or greed or stupidity or any number of other things people think their counterparts on the other side subscribe to) which is probably the biggest cause of the partisanship we live in today. Trust me; the other person is fairly rational; your demonizing them does not solve anything.
