The daily faction

“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 10, “none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

Although Madison and his Federalist cohorts championed popular sovereignty, they also believed that an unbridled popular government would lend excessive power to a tyrannical majority. He and others therefore constructed our Constitution upon the principle that government must protect itself from factions, or groups that would pursue their own private interests at the expense of the “aggregate” interests of the country.

To pursue one’s personal interest at the expense of another is an inherently human tendency, and one which neither good laws nor good people can eradicate. The government cannot vanquish this flaw, Madison recognized, but can only limit its destructive agency.

This flaw manifests itself in countless ways, but perhaps none more peculiarly than through our tendency to follow news sources that corroborate our own opinions. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof observed in March, the decline of American newspapers has prompted increasing numbers to find their news online, thus fueling a phenomenon Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has dubbed “The Daily Me.”

Kristof cites a vast range of sources confirming that when we look for news, especially online, the wide array of media outlets allows us to pick and choose our news sources according to our own opinions. This phenomenon still holds true, however, in the market for television and radio news as well. Consider, if you will, news outlets such as MSNBC, which caters to a liberal-minded audience, and FOX News, which caters to a more conservative-minded audience.  

As one audience tunes into Keith Olbermann, the other chooses Sean Hannity, both of whom, purportedly in the country’s best interests, offer specious arguments that sustain the political deadlock of divisiveness and bipolarity.

The problem, of course, is that political entertainers like Olbermann and Hannity have too much of a personal investment – in terms of money and prestige – in the espousal of doctrinaire political arguments to be trusted as legitimate political thinkers.  

Networks such as MSNBC and FOX have become the ringleaders for modern political factions. For as network producers and execs exploit man’s proclivity toward “The Daily Me” phenomenon to pad their ratings, political entertainers like Olbermann and Hannity exercise profound impact on the views of constituents, and thus upon the formation of public policy.  

Fortunately, the Constitution foresaw the demagoguery of Keith Olbermanns and Sean Hannitys, as well as the bumbling masses who gulp their drivel. And it brilliantly established safeguards insulating public policy from these factors. In so many ways, it protects us from ourselves and from our own flawed tendencies.

But it also assumed that we might have access to impartial information absent of rhetorical manipulation.

That’s why we need disinterested media more than ever. And it’s also why the decline of the American newspaper – and its portent for the legislative process – will affect even that trampled minority that still thinks independently and pursues opposing viewpoints.