On this panel - Black tie optional

The National Press Club recently sponsored a “Pajamas Media” panel event.

The topic: “How Partisan Is Too Partisan?”

The Panelists were Michael Barone (US News), Paul Mirengoff (Powerline), Tom Bevan (Real Clear Politics), Mark Blumenthal(The Mystery Pollster), Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Jane Hall of Fox News Watch. Roger Simon was “impresario.” The moderator was Instapundiit Glenn Reynolds.

Barone blogged about it:

The stated subject was "How partisan is too partisan?" but much of the discussion was about the biases of the mainstream media.
Hall, whom I had not previously met, thought it was unfair to tar everyone in the MSM as biased, and she questioned my assertion that about 90 percent of MSM personnel is Democrats and liberals (I was surprised she wasn't familiar with the research that supports this).

Rosett recalled an election night party in 1980 of Wall Street Journal reporters based in Chicago, at which only she and Paul Gigot were Reagan supporters–and were accordingly thrown out of the party.

I made some points that I have often made in my columns, in this blog, and in speeches. Americans are currently divided almost evenly between the parties, primarily along cultural lines, and the demographic factor that correlates most highly with voting behavior is religion.

This has generated angry partisanship, because the things that divide us are things we really care about. The harshness of the partisanship has been exacerbated by the fact that our two most recent presidents–both born in the first year of the baby boom (1946) and both graduating in the high school class with the peak SAT scores (1964)—just happen to have personal characteristics and political instincts that people on the other side of the cultural divide absolutely loathe.

There’s a lot more, all of it interesting. Read the whole thing, as Glenn Reynolds often advises.















http://www.defenddemocracy.org/biographies/biographies_show.htm?doc_id=197962