Nicholas Kristof – The Daily Me – NYTimes.com – Man, I really feel for the newspaper elite – they just don’t get it. Rather than make an effort to truly understand the monumental shift that is upending their industry they sit back and sling arrows at straw men of their own creation and hope against hope that somebody out there will miss them when they’re gone.

In this piece in the New York Times today Nicholas Kristof reaches into the newspaperman defense kit and pulls out the old “Daily Me” theme. Perhaps you have heard of it? It’s the absurd notion that all of this choice – all of these blogs and forums and opinions flowing through the wire – all of this conversation and reading and thinking that’s going on out there on the interweb – is actually going to make us more likely to have unconsidered opinions. Strange, I know.

To back up this position Kristof cites a number of books and some statistics that show how we are becoming a more polarized and divisive nation. We are clinging to our party – our political affiliation with an unprecedented zeal. This much is obvious. What’s not quite as obvious – at least to anyone with half an interest in thinking – is what is causing that.

Ask the newspaper folks – the ones who would rather cry about how things are changing than try to understand and work with that change – and they’ll tell you straight away – it’s the Internet (and you – the implicit point in this argument is that you’re just not qualified to formulate your own opinion – you need a professional editor to tell you what’s important – to not let you go off the rails into some unauthorized, dangerous thinking).

Yet, if we stop and think about this we begin to see a different picture. If we stop and really look at political coverage over the last several decades – especially since the advent of CNN and 24 hour news – we see that it is traditional media that has stoked and fueled this NFL style competitive atmosphere. With their red and blue maps the old school media elite have entrenched the two party system deep into the collective consciousness – old school media has simplified debate, banished nuance, and developed the sound bite to the point that the idea of a viable third party is now looked at as something of a joke. In the interest of profit old school media – the television/newspaper cabal – have poisoned political discourse in this country.

Really, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s columns like this one by Kristof that are killing newspapers. It’s just so detached from reality, so lost in it’s own narrative that it is simultaneously sad and enraging. Sad because this is people’s (journalists) livelihoods we’re talking about here – and enraged because we have let people who think this way manipulate our every thought for so long – too long.

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