About Across the Aisle

Welcome to Across the Aisle. We’re glad you’re here. Across the Aisle was born out of a desire to open discussion on the hot topics of the day and enable you, the reader, to explore various viewpoints on those topics before you draw a conclusion.
Marketing strategist Gregory Livingston notes that “consumer trust in traditional media forms has dramatically declined”1 as the Internet, with its ability “to fragment the mass audience of the traditional media,”2 has become the new dominant medium. Media researchers Li and Bernoff argue that “[m]edia isn’t neatly boxed into little rectangles called newspapers, magazines, and TV sets anymore. People connect with other people and draw power from other people, especially in crowds.”3 The new media and the shift in communication they facilitate have “created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.”4 At the same time, Gallup shows that trust in government is continually eroding, with just 19% of poll respondents in 2009 trusting Washington to do what is right “most of the time.”5
It is our mission to encourage thoughtful exploration, and to rely less on spoon-fed media treatments and more on individual synthesis of ideas. Across the Aisle is designed to give you immediate and comprehensible access to topics without trivializing them or glossing over their complexity. To these ends, I want to highlight what Across the Aisle attempts to do and what it does not attempt to do:
On Viewpoints
  • We do not present all viewpoints. Across the Aisle is not an aggregator of every particular viewpoint available. Not only would that be an impossible task, but due to the variations of thought on any given issue, we believe it would be only marginally valuable to the reader.
  • We do work to abstract the predominant positions on an issue and provide, with best effort, the best representation of those positions by well known, credible writers.
On Comprehensiveness
  • We do not attempt to be comprehensive. Across the Aisle is not the final stop on the road to exploring a topic but a starting point. We want to expose our readers to some representative positions in the hope that they will explore further and synthesize their own opinions.
  • We do attempt to provide a good starting point for exploration. We’ve succeeded if our readers examine viewpoints they may not have considered and find a jumping off point for further exploration.
On Fact and Opinion
  • We do not seek to exhaust all the facts about a particular topic. In many cases the facts on a given topic are complex or simply too voluminous to represent fairly in a small space.
  • We do strive to present authoritative, respected, or well-known writers that can help readers effectively frame topics from multiple perspectives. Across the Aisle hopes that by reading differing viewpoints readers will know where to focus their exploration as they seek the truth about the topics important to them.
In this highly fragmented and too often polarized political and social environment in which we live, it is our hope that Across the Aisle will be a source of increased engagement in, and thoughtful reflection on, the important topics of the day.
— Lewis Chisholm, Editor
1 Gregory Livingston, Now is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs (Baltimore, MD: Bartleby Press, 2007), 25.
2 Jones, Losing the News, Chap. 8.
3 Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Kindle ed. (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008), Chap. 1/Why the groundswell—and why now?
4 Ibid., Introduction.