[kool maudit]

Just on the question of bias... in the mid-20th century, newspapers provided a lot of services (e.g. classifieds, jobs listings etc.) that encouraged them to seek the broadest possible readership, as of course did print advertisements for mass-market products. Subscription fees and newsstand prices barely covered distribution. This favoured a middle-of-the-road approach that ideally would leave no significant of the population feeling too left out. Of course, there was still a degree of branding, and a paper could be the working man's paper or the cerebral paper or whatever, but all of them needed to gather multiple constituencies in order to provide these key non-editorial services.

Now, online advertising never pulled in a fraction of what print did, and has been been a subset of social media anyway since 2010 or earlier. The classifieds are at craigslist and the want ads are on LinkedIn. What you need now are eyeballs and a tribe, and this favours a flashy, combative, in-group/out-group style of coverage.

It's very similar with visual media, what with the differences between the capital investment needed for even a small, local network vs. YouTube or TikTok or Liveleak.

Like 90% of this is structural rather than because we (this is more commonly phrased as "they", i.e. the out-group) have become a certain way.

It was the same in the late 19th century. The consensus society was an epiphenomenon of a lot of mid-20th century commercial and ownership structures.