How is America supposed to unite around any course of action as the solution to any problem if we cannot agree on what the underlying facts are?
I’m not convinced there is a "market solution" to this problem. What sells—what people want—is not news that’s accurate, but rather news that’s opinionated and that conforms to people’s own ideology. I can’t remember the last slander or libel suit I’ve heard of, so it seems one can say practically anything and have it defended as "free speech." Unfortunately, when the audience shifts itself to opinion-based reporting and when there’s no standard for holding reporters accountable for facts, we end up basing our decision-making upon an incomplete (and often incorrect) picture of reality.
Sadly, this extends to the very basic facts upon which Americans are asked to support foreign policy. Two examples: Liberals have been convinced for several years that, based upon the preponderance of the evidence, no useable WMD have been found in Iraq; Conservatives vehemently disagree with this conclusion, arguing point blank that the WMD have been found. Conservatives argue that President Bush has never stated Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were operationally linked; liberals dispute this assertion with multiple citations of statements by Vice-President Cheney.
Some have suggested that the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine is to fault for the current state of confusion; others argue that Doctrine was never about fairness, but rather suppression of opposing views. There is probably truth on both sides of that one.
Truth is a fluid thing; part of America’s "War on Terror" is a thinly veiled (and sometimes unveiled) discomfort with Islam. While there certainly is inflammatory language to be found, some argue it’s misinterpreted or taken out of context. Many Islamic cultures are engaged in the subjugation of women; this affects and offends our Western value system differently than that of those countries. From our standpoint, it is difficult for us to interpret our enemies’ values in a meaningful way. It makes it even more difficult when our government chooses not to interpret at all—the words of our enemies, Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad specifically, are ignored along with their grievances, as they are simply cast as madmen. And we wonder why we fail to comprehend the real reasons for "why do they hate us?"
This leads us to another aspect of the disregard for facts, which is the related disregard for expert opinion. The smear campaign upon universities that labels them "elitist"—while partially accurate in identifying a demonstrable liberal bias among professors—throws the baby out with the bath water by diminishing the public’s regard for subject matter experts with advanced degrees, who have studied topics in depth. Whereas people with deep experience in foreign policy—to use one policy area as an example—used to be the experts cited and booked as guests in the media, that role has been shifted more often to opinion journalists such as Ann Coulter and to people working in private think tanks with agenda, such as the conservative American Enterprise Institute or the liberal Center for American Progress.
In this way, in parallel with the move from fact-based to opinion-based journalism, we’ve created networks of opinion-based "Experts" who can be called upon to support our opinions and agenda. These private think tanks employ or commission scientists, so not only do we have talking heads who agree with us, but they can cite subject experts and scientists who support their view of the world rather than an objective one.
None of these opinion-oriented voices should be quieted, but we must find a way to balance them with sources we can rely on for objective fact. Otherwise the reign of the obnoxious talk radio personality will never end, and poor policy will remain standard operating procedure.