The story is told of a medieval student who, having detected spots in the sun, announced his discovery to a learned man. “My son,” said the latter, “I have read Aristotle many times, and I assure you there is nothing of the kind mentioned by him. Be certain that the spots which you have seen are in your eyes and not in the sun.

Since the very beginning of rational thought, there have been two opposing trends: idealism and materialism …
Idealism is on the side of order. Its champion in ancient times was Plato, who argued that the truth was beyond question, and that those of inferior ranks were not fit to understand the complexity of natural philosophy. Today’s idealists argue the same thing in modern form. The aim of science, from this viewpoint, is to conserve, to explain the universe at large, and to suggest in elaborate and sophisticated ways that the sole purpose of communicating science is so that the public appreciate the status of science and scientists.
Materialism is practical and experimental. For centuries, the materialist view did not gain support in cultured circles, because of its revolutionary potential, the same potential that was realised in the Renaissance. It is fundamentally a philosophy of matter in motion, an account of nature and society from below rather than above. It is a philosophy that realises the power of change through getting to know nature’s ground rules.
The very continuation of the struggle … suggests that it is … a reflection of political struggles in the scientific sphere. At various times, idealism has been used to justify an existing state of affairs. And at each stage, materialism has called upon a practical test of reality and on the necessity of change.

Such threats [of the death of common culture] have been thematized ever since taste subcultures first came to be studied, and have as yet failed to materialise as dramatically as may have been expected; a reason for this is that no taste subculture ever operates on its own, and that no one community member ever serves as part of only one taste culture. In reality, our tastes and interests are always multiple, and more or less diverse and contradictory, our personas never unified or uniform; through our everyday interactions with others, and with culture itself, we sustain the continued engagement between the different cultural and social perspectives and communities in our society.

Clearly, such engagement is not perfectly distributed, of course; indeed, we might suggest that the quality of social and cultural exchange in society is directly related to the diversity of interests and tastes held by any one of its members. A further move towards niche cultures, far from fragmenting society, could therefore also be seen to increase our mutual understanding.

A study of prime-time newsmagazines in 1997, for instance, reveals a genre of investigative reporting that ignores most of the matters typically associated with the watchdog role of the press. Fewer than one in ten stories on these programs concerned the combined topics of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security, politics, or social welfare - or any of the areas where most public money is spent. More than half the stories, rather, focused on lifestyle, behavior, consumerism, health, or celebrity entertainment. (Marc Gunther, Nieman Reports, 27, Summer 1999)

Gentzkow and Shapiro then asked what other factors help explain a newspaper’s slant. They found that the most important variable is the political orientation of people living within the paper’s market. For example, the higher the vote share received by Bush in 2004 in the newspaper’s market (horizontal axis below), the higher the Gentzkow-Shapiro measure of conservative slant (vertical axis).

On the other hand, the politics of the paper’s owner seem to matter much less. For example, once one controls for geographic factors, there is no statistically significant correlation between the newspaper’s own slant (horizontal axis below) and average slant of papers in other communities owned by the same owner (vertical axis).

What accounts for this reluctance to run with stories that involve the highest circulation UK paper, the world’s biggest media corporation and a key aide to the possible next prime minister? First, newspapers prefer to ignore each other’s exclusives if they can. Second, they observe the rules of “mutually assured destruction”: like nuclear powers, they don’t attack the enemy for fear of retaliation. Indeed, News International and the Telegraph agreed a sort of test ban treaty in 2007 when the latter’s owners, the Barclays, withdrew a libel claim against the Times. Third, if Coulson becomes Cameron’s press aide in Downing Street, he will become a vital source of political information. Above all, journalists prefer to keep the plumbing of their trade – the unglamorous details of how they obtain information – out of public scrutiny.

My claim: We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved. That’s what created the pattern I’ve called “regression to a phony mean.” That’s what motivated the rise of he said, she said reporting.

A lot of the conventional wisdom thinks that the cause of the decline of journalism today is that the Internet killed it, and it destroyed the business model, or that the Great Recession took away advertising, and had the Internet not come along, or had the Great Recession not taken place, everything would be just fine and journalism would be quite strong. What we demonstrate in the book— and I think the evidence is fairly overwhelming—is that the crisis of journalism began decades ago. The profit motive ultimately is not compatible with the public service of journalism, particularly when it’s sheathed in a conglomerate that makes its money by stripping newsrooms for parts of monopolistic environments.

it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent should the Executive Branch and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant power over citizens? This issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government.