Historically newspapers and the network nightly news attempted to provide information without promoting a political position - assuming that informed citizens are capable of coming to their own conclusions and thereby taking advantage of one benefit of living in a free society.
We tend to be lazy though...
It takes intellectual effort to sift thorough differing points of view and come up with, and articulate, our own world view. It's easier to let someone else tell us what to think using small simplistic sound bites. Bush is an idiot, Hillary's a liar, Obama's a bigot, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat liar...etc.
Things are never that simple, and once we descend into that sort of dialogue we demean ourselves and in some sense the people who sacrificed so much to give us freedom.
No one knows where the current state of media leads us, but it's hard to imagine an informed citizenry without paid news journalists. Some newspapers have experimented with allowing readers to provide comments on news stories in an attempt to keep pace with the news-aggregators, who use intellectual property from newspapers without having to share in the cost of creating that content. In a quote from the New Yorker article, Eric Alterman writes,
"The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards on its Web site for all political news stories. Its public editor, Timothy J. McNulty, complained, not without reason, that “the boards were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”"
In some ways the internet is akin to amateur radio. In the days before citizen band radio the only people who were allowed to broadcast had to have an FCC license. This meant they had to follow a set of rules and agreed to be use a call sign that uniquely identified them. When CB radio came into being anyone could talk and had complete anonymity.
There's something about human nature that leads people to act differently when they can't be identified (think about how you might act in your car if you are upset with another driver vs. how you might act if that same person was face to face with you). This led to a decline in what was going over the airwaves to the point that CB radio became useless for conversation and became a place for swearing and inane chatter. I'm basing this on a small sample of CB radio I listened to in a city years ago. Maybe it's different on the interstate where truckers use it.
The point is that anonymity is not conducive to conversation. A real conversation would require I know something about who you are and what your background is. Absent that I'm not interested in what you have to say - why should I be for all I know I'm having An Internet Chat with Koko the Gorilla.
