We’ve become so stratified not only in politics, but in coverage of politics, that it’s frequently possible to turn on Fox News and MSNBC’s coverage of the same event and get two radically different, seemingly incompatible accounts of it. (And it should go without saying that if the comments to this post start turning into attacks against one side of the aisle or the other, or individual posters, that stuff’s getting deleted post-haste.) But what struck me in tracking this story both on TV and online was how unified everything became. I cover TV, not politics, and I learned a long time ago that politics is a subject that almost no one can discuss rationally anymore, and certainly not on the Internet. I’ll leave the political impact of this to other writers on other sites. But for a few hours, at least, late on a Sunday night in 2011, TV news and social media made us feel whole as a country again. Midway through his speech announcing that US special forces had killed Osama Bin Laden, President Obama recalled the sense of unity that Americans had felt on 9/11, acknowleding, “I know it has, at times, frayed.” Nearly 10 years after the towers fell, the Pentagon burned and Flight 93 crashed, we are in many ways a more fractured society than we were on September 10, 2001.
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