Friday, September 29, 2006 12:01 a.m.

We are talking past each other, the left and right in America. I suppose we
always did, but I'm noticing it more. We have different intellectual styles
(rather too emotive, arguably too linear), start with different assumptions,
and recognize different data. We could be speaking different languages.
Which is odd, since all half the country does is talk. (The other half puts
roofs on houses.) You'd think they'd find a way to break through.
And so I come to Bill Clinton and Fox News Channel. A week after it aired,
the interview still dominates the dinner party. Did he rouse his base? I
think so. Did he remind everyone else of what they find objectionable in
him? I know so.

But in Manhattan this week at gatherings of hungry liberals--they are
feeling frisky, they can smell victory coming, though this is not
necessarily indicative of anything, as Manhattan liberals are traditionally
the last to know, and occasionally and endearingly concede they are the
last--the conversation wasn't really about Clinton, but Fox News.

One can't exaggerate how large Fox looms in the liberal imagination. They
see it as huge and mighty and credit it with almost mythical powers. It is a
propaganda channel whose mission it is to destroy the Democratic Party.
That's part of why Clintons' performance had such salience. Finally he was
standing up to an evil empire.

It is odd that they are so spooked. In October America is set to become a
nation of 300 million. What a big country. Fox News's average evening
prime-time viewership is less than two million. Its average daytime is less
than a million. And if my mail is an indication, they're already
Republicans. Fox's power is that it is an alternative to the mainstream
media. It did not take its shape by deeply inhaling liberalism and slowly
breathing it out.





The left sees Fox as a symptom and promoter of anarchy. The old unity, the
old essential unity one used to experience when one turned on the TV in 1950
or 1980, has been fractured, broken up. We are becoming balkanized. Fox,
blogs, talk radio, the Internet, citizen reporters--it's all producing
cacophony, and heralds a future of No Compromise. No one trusts the
information they're given anymore, as they trusted Uncle Walter. This is bad
for the country.
It is an odd thing about modern liberals that they're made anxious by the
unsanctioned. A conservative is more likely to see what's happening as
freedom. It isn't that honest and impartial news lost its place of respect,
it's that establishment liberalism lost its journalistic monopoly. And it
was a monopoly.

Not everyone believed Uncle Walter. Uncle Walter, and Chet and David, were
all there was. But while they reigned, Americans were buying "Conscience of
a Conservative" by Barry Goldwater, and Reagan was quietly rising way out in
California, and Spiro Agnew and Bill Safire were issuing mainstream hits
like "effete snobs" and "nattering nabobs." In the time liberals think of as
the last great unified era, Americans were rising up.

The new media did not divide us. The new media gave voice to our divisions.
The result: more points of view, more subjects discussed, more data
presented. This, in a great republic, a great democracy, a leader of the
world in a dangerous time, is not bad but good.

But nothing comes free. All big changes have unexpected benefits and
unanticipated drawbacks. Here is a loss: the man on the train.

Forty and 50 years ago, mainstream liberal media executives--middle-aged men
who fought in Tarawa or Chosin, went to Cornell, and sat next to the man in
the gray flannel suit on the train to the city, who hoisted a few in the bar
car, and got off at Greenwich or Cos Cob, Conn.--those great old liberals
had some great things in them.

One was a high-minded interest in imposing certain standards of culture on
the American people. They actually took it as part of their mission to
elevate the country. And from this came..."Omnibus."

When I was a child of 8 or so I looked up at the TV one day and saw a man
cry, "My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!" He was on a field of
battle, surrounded by mud and loss. I was riveted. Later a man came on the
screen and said, "Thank you for watching Shakespeare's 'Richard III.' " And
I thought, as a little American child: That was something, I gotta find out
what a Shakespeare is.

I got that from "Omnibus."

Those old men on the train--they were strangers, but in the age of media a
stranger can change your life.

And because the men on the train had one boss, who shared their vision--he
didn't want to be embarrassed that his legacy was "My Mother the Car"--and
because the networks had limited competition, the pressure to live or die by
ratings was not so intense as today. The competition for ad dollars wasn't
so killer. They could afford an indulgence. The result was a real public
service.

Now the man on the train is a relic, and no one is saying, "As the lucky
holders of a broadcast license we have a responsibility to pass on the
jewels of our culture to the young." In a competitive environment that would
be a ticket to corporate oblivion at every network, including Fox.

TV is still great, in some ways better than ever. Freedom works.

And yet. When we deposed the old guy on the train, it wasn't all gain. No
longer would the old liberals get to impose their vision. But what took its
place was programming for the lowest common denominator. Things that don't
make you reach. Things you don't want to teach. Eating worms on air-crash
island with "Jackass."





I spoke with a network producer a few weeks ago, an old warhorse who was
trying to explain his frustration at the current ratings race. He wrestled
around the subject, and I cut with rude words to what I thought he was
saying. "You mean it's gone from the dictatorship of a liberal elite to the
dictatorship of the retarded."
Yes, he said. And it's not progress.

When liberals miss something in the media, that's what they should be
missing. Not a unity that never existed but standards that were high. When
conservatives say there's nothing to miss, they're wrong. We lost some bias,
but we lost some standards, too.



.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of
"John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which
you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays
on OpinionJournal.com.


--

It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which the
liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn our military
victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad for them, it's
failing.