You’ve put a nicely-worded finger on several things I’ve been worrying about for a little while now and not thought of as tied in with “media literacy.”

We don’t acknowledge and try to bridge differences in epistemology as we should in the classroom (or, for that matter, in the newsroom), and I think you’re quite right that a lot of the conflict is between, or over, epistemologies.

There is one omission I would like to highlight, though, in talking about the conflict of epistemologies. Progressives — and academics — are also riven by epistemic divisions. The “elite” epistemology of science has been losing ground inside some of the social sciences and humanities (sociology, most notably), and this civil epistemic conflict is, I think, of central importance; and that division cuts across the traditional progressive / conservative division.