The Cornell Democrats and The College Republicans found common ground in Rockefeller Hall last night during a debate concerning media bias and its effect on civic education. The debate was sponsored by the newly founded Freedom and Free Societies. The sponsors of the debate defined civic education as education enabling citizens to make informed decisions concerning public policy and elected officials.

“Bias is inevitable,” said Prof. Barry Strauss, history, one of the judges of the debate. “You have to force yourself to look at different points of view regularly and accept [that] media bias is real.”

While both republicans and democrats agreed that bias exists within the media and results in the decline of civic education, they disagreed on why and how the bias is elicited.

On Feb. 27, 90 Cornell students traveled to Washington, D.C. to join over 12,000 young people from around the country for Powershift 2009, the largest national youth conference on global climate change to date.

After two days of workshops, discussion panels and speakers, the students rallied on Capitol Hill for carbon emission legislation, green jobs and environmental regulation,

You would think that being selected as a New York Times columnist would spur you to churn out some of the highest-quality prose you could muster. It was surprising, then, when Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and scion of the right-wing punditocracy, blessed the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed pages with possibly the worst writing it’d ever seen. Kristol, no stranger to the argumentative essay or the persuasive piece, regularly gave his name to columns that were shoddily structured, shabbily researched and just plain boring; it seemed at times as if the veteran polemicist were doing little more than filtering propaganda into the backside of the front section.

Of the many historic firsts marked by Tuesday’s inauguration, one of the least compelling is the fact that we now have a Crackberry addict as our commander-in-chief. Shameless e-mail checkers and headline watchers around the country were validated as Obama’s assumption of the highest position in the land signaled the official enshrinement of the Web-and-media culture that defines so many Americans.

Several issues drive the media debate about the situation in Gaza and Israel. The primary one is inevitable, created by the competing narratives of history that have shaped the conflict since its beginnings. The “Palestine Solidarity” community and their “We Stand With Israel” opponents will always quarrel about who started the violence. They argue further over which side has followed international law, which side is the victim, which side is the aggressor and who lays claim to the land.