By: Emily Vaughan Mitt Romney talks about changing a ?broken Washington.? Barack Obama built his entire platform around the word ?together.? According to the 2008 presidential candidates, this election is about redirecting American politics and mending a polarized America. And the country seems to be embracing this idea.
Now, proponents of unity and bipartisan discussion have a place to get together. The E.W. Scripps Company launched RedBlueAmerica.com, a Web site for readers to come together, offer their views, and debate them in what the site's creators insist is a truly non-partisan forum.
?There was a real need for a place where people thought they were getting points of view from both sides,? said John Temple, the site's founder and Scripps' vice president/news for the newspaper division. ?A lot of intelligent people want to test their ideas and have them challenged by people who think differently.?
?Is there any common ground?? the Web site asks on its About Us page. ?Fox or CNN? Wall Street Journal or New York Times? Free Republic or DailyKos?? RedBlueAmerica, he adds, fills this void; it is designed to be a meeting place that is completely unbiased.
But the site trying to ?bridge the divide? crosses more than the gulf between liberals and conservatives. It links opposing topics and formats. It?s a social networking site and a news service. It covers political and cultural topics. It wants user-generated content while still maintaining quality control. It?s a hybrid of, well, everything.
The site?s primary goal, though, is to encourage discussion. Its tag line, ?Best thinking. Both sides,? speaks to the core of what it?s trying to accomplish. RedBlueAmerica delivers the news and background information people need to engage in thoughtful discussion through an e-mail service and with articles and opinion pieces compiled on the site. Then it allows users to talk about them.
?We didn?t want to create a site where people screamed and yelled at each other,? said Linda Sease, director of marketing for Scripps' newspaper division and Temple?s closest associate on the project. ?We didn?t want to create a site with an agenda.?
To maintain transparency, two online journalists, one ?red? and one ?blue,? moderate the site, picking topics, finding articles, and monitoring discussions. Joel Mathis, the blue moderator, and self-proclaimed ?liberal guy from Kansas," and red moderator and conservative Californian Ben Boychuk are both experienced opinion journalists.
For users, RedBlueAmerica offers a little bit of everything. You can write your own blog. You can post ?thoughts? on other people?s views. You can answer polls. There are even personal profiles where you can count your friends a la MySpace or Facebook. The users are the most important part of the site.
?We want a lively, civil conversation about things people are talking about in the community or things people should be talking about,? Temple added. ?We want to create an environment that people feel makes them smarter.?
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