Nobody is arguing against the free market of ideas. What is being suggested here is that we aren't keeping up with providing our kids and ourselves with the tools to NAVIGATE that free market of ideas.
Tools that help to identify the bias of a particular source. Tools that help users of information sort through the variety that is out there and figure out what information is true, and what is false.
Don't know what tools you are talking about, but such tools already exist - they are the new media that Obama and Ikari just railed against.
If someone like Glenn Beck had falsified quotes thirty years ago, the chances are that he would have gotten away with it. Whereas today, all it takes is one person in a million to plunge into the abundance of information and find it out. If this person has a point, then others will take notice and the information will spread. Will it convince Beck's die-hard supporters? Probably not, but if it really is a good point, there's a good chance it'll dissuade more moderate potential listeners from flocking to him.
There is a difference between, for instance, a book promoted on the Glenn Beck show that FALSIFIES QUOTES from the founding fathers to justify theocracy, and scholarship that has been peer-reviewed and held up to academic scrutiny.
There isn't, in the sense that neither should be accepted as word of God. Nothing should be, and everything should be taken with a hint of skepticism, peer reviewed or not.
The fact is that both sides present the "facts" with their own spin. It's hard to find factual information on many topics.
This has always been true. Now there is open availability of spin from all sides, though, the one thing that didn't exist before. It's also a lot less hard to find factual information on any topic than before, so I'm not really sure how new media supposedly exacerbates this problem when in fact it minimizes it.
Disinformation is very easy to spread when you hide it in emotionalized rhetoric and nationalism. People can choose whatever they want, but I told you exactly what needs to happen if your goal is to preserve the Republic. Only a fool would suggest that giving one's self up to the misinformation out there, to allow one to be pulled and pushed along the tides of hyperpartisan "news" would be a good thing. It's not a good thing.
Of course not. Which is why the new media is such a great thing. Rather than creating one "tide" that is the mainstream media, it spreads information out into something that anyone can access. It also spreads disinformation out into something that anyone can access. But frankly, seeing the latter rather than the former is an inherently elitist view, since it assumes that most people will take untruth over truth when both are readily available - meaning that if an educated society is to exist, information can't be freely available. But many people stop just short of realizing that conclusion to their views.
I don't expect that everyone has the same political opinion as I do. In fact, it would be a little bothersome, I couldn't rant if everyone agreed with me. However, there is a difference in saying that people can have a different opinion and having an opinion based almost entirely off of hyperbole, spin, emotionalized rhetoric, and hyperpartisan hackery. If people read books and educated themselves and had a different opinion than me, fine. So long as it's an educated, researched opinion, I feel well better than that. It's when these opinions are born of ignorance that I start to worry. Smart people disagreeing is one thing. Misinformed people running on emotional knee jerk reactions are completely different.
And yet, you said that this is to "preserve the Republic". But if everyone's opinions stay the same and everyone votes the same way and basically nothing changes, what will have been preserved?
Do you ever encounter leftist posters on here who have absorbed their opinions wholesale from the Daily Kos and/or Democratic Underground? Or rightist posters on here who regularly cite the Free Republic without any corroborating evidence?
That's what we're talking about here.
The Daily Kos and Free Republic are no different than Newsweek or the Scientific American. Rush Limbargh and Rachel Maddow are no different from Walter Lippmann. They are all filters for information; information is almost never raw. The difference is that now we can all choose our filters, and thus the views of the information seeker come before the filter. Do you really think that those who read Free Republic or Democratic Underground would think or view things any differently if they didn't read those? No, because they could only find those sites in the first place by looking around at all the different filters. If they choose that filter to be the best, it says more about the reader than about what they are reading. It'll only appeal to a larger audience if it actually has good points. And it doesn't appeal to a larger audience, because most people don't read either of those.
