Sure, but at least you have options and get to choose.
Long form content, unrestricted by executives telling people how to run their show, all that makes a big difference. There is no need for corporate bureaucrats to try to run things.
I'm an old-ish person (61). I started watching the news when I was about 12. I think we were better off as a society when there were basically 3 TV/radio networks (ABC,CBS and NBC) each dispensing basically the same dull, boring (by today's standards) newscast. There were newspapers, of course, and they tended to be where you'd find the more opinionated stuff, but there were limits on how many newspapers an entity could own in any particular market. The fairness doctrine reigned over broadcast news, so you wouldn't have stuff like Fox news and probably not even a lot of what's on MSNBC. It just feels to me like we had a more cohesive national vision and weren't nearly as divided as we are now. I'm sure this will be unpopular here, but I'm not sure more options has helped us in terms of being able to live together. So many families can't even meet for Thanksgiving dinner anymore, for example, because of the arguments that break out. People are living in completely different truth bubbles now which makes it almost impossible to communicate.
I'm don't want to be completely pollyannish about the past - there were probably things we weren't hearing about from those fewer outlets. But I'm also not sure how we move forward as a society in a situation where there are so many different shattered views of what is true.
I respectfully disagree. That state of affairs made people more “united” - perhaps, but it was at the expense of knowledge about the true nature of our reality.
We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality, and the only way to have a satisfying answer to that question is to have unfettered access to the underlying facts and knowledge of who is who.
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