On Saturday 95,000 of my closest friends and I poured into the Big House at the University of Michigan to see my nephew Chris graduate from college. It was gratifying to see such a nice turnout for him. Of course it is possible the enormous crowd also came to see the other grads and the commencement speaker. He was a man named Barack O-something and boy, what a speech he gave.

Lost amidst the appropriately non-stop coverage of the failed car-bombing in Times Square, the predictably masturbatory coverage of the White House Correspondent’s Dinner (“Morning Joe” was particularly nauseating), and the other news of Obama’s first visit to the burgeoning enviro-cataclysm on the Gulf Coast, was Saturday afternoon’s commencement address by the President.

Obama, like others before him, chose to use the address not only to speak to a group of graduating college seniors, but to the rest of us as well. His topic was the media and his focus was one very close to this blog’s heart (can a blog have a heart? if it can have an oft-vented spleen, then why not…) — the vanishing importance of facts in journalism and in America.

Get Real has been, from the start, an attempt to separate the wheat (facts) from the chaff (opinion) when it comes to mainstream media reporting. We’ve taken on the NY Times and the NY Post — MSNBC and Fox News Channel. The point has not been to simply point fingers and move on but to get people to start thinking about the consequences of a media filled with people talking about the news instead of reporting the news. The distinction is important because without the reporting, the often expensive and painstaking work of gathering facts, highlighting mistruths, and giving the rest of us a baseline understanding of what’s actually going on, there will be no actual news left to talk about. The scary thing is how quickly we’ve moved in that direction.

And so on Saturday afternoon Obama chose to discuss this very topic.

Today’s 24/7 echo-chamber amplifies the most inflammatory soundbites louder and faster than ever before.  And it’s also, however, given us unprecedented choice.  Whereas most Americans used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner, or a few influential papers on Sunday morning, we now have the option to get our information from any number of blogs or websites or cable news shows.  And this can have both a good and bad development for democracy.  For if we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we become more polarized, more set in our ways.  That will only reinforce and even deepen the political divides in this country.

Of course Obama has a political motive to talk about this. He won as the “uniter” by appealing to independents who told pollsters they didn’t like the tone in Washington. A year later the tone is uglier than ever and Obama knows he will never succeed by jumping into the swamp. But it was interesting the see the reaction to his speech of those around me. I was with a die-hard conservative and seated near some people who’d loudly talked about how they’d wished the university had picked someone other than “that socialist” to give the commencement. What did they think of all this? Obama continued.

If we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from. Now, this requires us to agree on a certain set of facts to debate from.  That’s why we need a vibrant and thriving news business that is separate from opinion makers and talking heads. That’s why we need an educated citizenry that values hard evidence and not just assertion. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously once said, “Everybody is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

That last bit had everyone, including the conservatives around me, clapping their hands and shaking their heads in agreement. So Kumbaya, right? If only life were so easy. Without resorting to an instant polling session (made impractical by the fact that the ceremony continued on for another hour) I couldn’t find out if everyone really in agreement or just agreeing that the other side should stick to the “facts” more. It would be great if the former was true but I fear it’s more likely the latter.

Several polls (notably the Pew Poll) have shown a deepening of the partisan news divide and an increase in American’s dependence on cable news networks for information. Since two of the three major cable news networks have abandoned almost any sense of objectivity (that afternoon a Fox News anchor teased an upcoming segment, “A new move to ban toys in Happy Meals: Is this another example of the nanny state? A fair and balanced debate next!”) it’s fair to say that more and more of us are seeing less and less actual journalism. The result, like that following our move towards a fat and sugar-laden fast food diet, is obesity — in this case an intellectual obesity in which people have no hunger for, nor interest in, anything they aren’t already consuming.

Obama’s plea for a healthier news diet was truly non-partisan because many liberals seem just as righteous in their certitude as conservatives (compare the Daily Kos with Red State and you’ll see what I mean). But will anybody actually act on the good doctor’s advice? Will the media actually spend a second to reflect on its responsibility for any of this? And if this is really so serious, shouldn’t Obama have repeated this address (or at least the substance of it) later Saturday when he flew back to Washington to speak at the White House Correspondents Dinner instead of giving a predictable, mildly amusing, totally inside-the-beltway dinner speech? That certainly would have garnered some headlines.

Instead it’s Monday, and everyone’s returned to their roles. On the kooky Fox and Friends co-anchor Brian Kilmeade looked at the surveillance video released by the NYPD showing the suspect in the Times Square car bomb attempt and said, “What I was surprised at is that right away they say he’s a forty-ish white guy…. I don’t know if they’re just placating the public but that doesn’t look like a white guy necessarily.” Check out the travesty here.