I have really been meaning to pick up Farhad Manjoo's "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society." We read the first two chapters in Science and Society last year, and I thought that his take on all this was pretty interesting.

"We used to all be guests at Walter Cronkite's dinner table. But now the dinner guests have rioted, schismed, and formed insular groups talking loudly at each other about the things they think are important, and no one hears anything they don't already want to hear." Certainly it was bad to just be listening to whatever Cronkite told you, but is this better? How do we tell the difference between good information and bad information when we know that we automatically discount anything that seems like it supports "The Other Side"?

It's not that the death of traditional journalism has caused this problem -- quite the opposite, I think things are better now that we are moderately independent in finding our news sources. But this is a problem that'll have to be addressed in the coming years if we're going to get ANYTHING done.

Which eventually leads back to my "Why i want to be a science teacher" rant.