I'm reading a really neat book right now. It's a collection of essays by Ellen Goodman called Paper Trail.

In reading her introduction, I can tell that she and I are definitely on the same page, so to speak.

Opinion-writing and opinion-speaking over the course of these years have become something closer to a combat sport: opinion-hurling. We moved into a time when politics became polarized and political debate became more like a food fight. The Olympic sport of opinion-hurling found a stadium on talk radio and cable TV, the playing fields of certitude.
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Americans have felt ambivalent about many issues of the past decade -- from abortion to gay marriage, from welfare reform to globalization -- but rarely heard that ambivalence in the media. On the panels and round tables that dot TV, they only see two sides of an issue when people filled with certainty and untinged with doubt are invited to duke it out.
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... I listen to talk radio. The voices of the anchor and the call-in audience seem linked by anger as much as politics. I am not sure why certitude is so much the rage. And rage is the right word.
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I've tried to stay on my own, somewhat separate trail through this increasingly noisy corridor. The columns on these pages were written for people who argue with both hands, the one and the other, and occasionally end up with them clasped together.