The New Yorker had a fantastic piece on the Keith Olbermann phenomenon, one that Olbermann himself agrees wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for its diametrically-opposed counterpart, the O’Reilly phenomenon.

Olbermann’s success, like O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” [MSNBC Vice President Phil] Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”

It’s an interesting development, and one that dovetails with the viewership march from the mainstream media to the blogosphere to get news. Is this a reaction to information overload? When confronted with an overwhelming onslaught of news items from an increasing number of global sources, do we turn to someone to follow the news, digest it and parse it for us in a form more easy to assimilate?

I know that Timothy Ferriss, the Four-Hour Workweek guy, says that he doesn’t follow politics at all, and just asks a friend or two that he trusts to tell him whom to vote for each election cycle. He’s an incredibly busy guy, he has his own dreams to follow, and doesn’t feel that following each detail of the lengthy political process gives him any more necessary perspective than his friends’ advice give him when it matters.

The Information Age has given those of us with access to the internet’s resources freedom to go both broad and deep on data as never before. But, at a certain point, each of us has to make some choices as to what to limit our exposure to - we don’t have the time or mental energy to dig through everything and still have time to get work done. Might it be fair for matters of politics to turn to our favorite partisan blogger or “news analyst” to both inform us on what’s important and also shape our opinion?

I’m not so sure. I personally find myself turning daily to the Drudge Report, a right-leaning news page, even though I’m left-of-center myself. Why? My other purviews into the world of politics are decidedly mired in a Democratic/left political ethos, and I wonder what else I’m missing out there. And although Drudge doesn’t provide any of his own commentary besides the shaping of his headlines’ titles, he does exert an editorial bias on which stories he publishes (and how long he keeps them up).

I feel it’s important to keep a pulse on the sentiments of people who you might not necessarily agree with, but whose line of thinking you can at least consider rational enough to respect. But this is just one man’s opinion. In today’s politically-polarized atmosphere, maybe true neutrality is something that’s too much to ask for.