"By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

-James Madison, Federalist 10

The editors needed to grab readers’ attention without getting some so mad they cancelled their subscriptions. Kaiser and Stanley yearned to win awards with tough reporting but without alienating the community.

“We’re losing touch with our readers,” Senior Editor Gary Krentz would say, suggesting that the coverage of some issue had gone too far in one direction.

In the Belly of the Beast (via The Japery)

In politics, too, one strives to get attention and support alongside the goal of alienating as few people as possible. Here, we have support for a thesis that both political parties and the mainstream media comprise a single faction.

Addendum 8/04:

Richard Posner in the NYTimes sees something similar, albeit without disapproving or bringing faction into it:

To see what difference the elimination of a communications bottleneck can make, consider a town that before the advent of television or even radio had just two newspapers because economies of scale made it impossible for a newspaper with a small circulation to break even. Each of the two, to increase its advertising revenues, would try to maximize circulation by pitching its news to the median reader, for that reader would not be attracted to a newspaper that flaunted extreme political views. There would be the same tendency to political convergence that is characteristic of two-party political systems, and for the same reason - attracting the least committed is the key to obtaining a majority.

One of the two newspapers would probably be liberal and have a loyal readership of liberal readers, and the other conservative and have a loyal conservative readership. That would leave a middle range. To snag readers in that range, the liberal newspaper could not afford to be too liberal or the conservative one too conservative. The former would strive to be just liberal enough to hold its liberal readers, and the latter just conservative enough to hold its conservative readers. If either moved too close to its political extreme, it would lose readers in the middle without gaining readers from the extreme, since it had them already.

He does, however, incorporate the Press into the system for moderating the effects of factionalism:

Still, because there is a market demand for correcting the errors and ferreting out the misdeeds of one's enemies, the media exercise an important oversight function, creating accountability and deterring wrongdoing. That, rather than educating the public about the deep issues, is their great social mission. It shows how a market produces a social good as an unintended byproduct of self-interested behavior.