Was it Facebook 'wot won it? Rory Cellen-Jones, BBC
In answer: Not entirely, but it played a role.
Since the days of the founders the American Media has always had an inflated opinion of itself. In the early days newspapers were house organs for the political views of their founders, in later days the news barons took over and openly shaped the political discourse in the ways they desired.
Recently, the media has sought to hide behind the cloak of "Neutrality". A cloak that was transparent in it's falsehood, but dishonest (at best) in it's inability to self-examine. In short, the unsigned editorial became a political statement without political consequence. Bad Newspapers, like say, the Houston Chronicle, could take editorial positions and use it to skew their hard media coverage without a hint of self-awareness that reporting of this type was not 'neutral' at all.
But media neutrality has always been a lie.
Walter Cronkite, the revered newsman, was progressive, he approached all of his reporting with the idea that the progressive ideals were the correct ideals. The same goes for Dan Rather, Peter Jennnings, and pretty much every other news-reader you can think of. Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias" was the first time any insider showed America exactly what was going on behind the curtain of TV news.
And while we haven't had a "Bias" written for newspapers (one reason: few would care) it's becoming patently obvious that the problem within the fish-wraps is worse than it is on the television. As someone whose watched local and national media for a while now, I can name on one hand the number of local reporters in Houston who have a political world-view close to what you or I might consider "conservative". I will not name them here for their job-security.
The problem is most evident when viewing the editorial staffs of the dailies, where conservative thought is given short-shrift and progressive ideals are the norm. Sure, there will be times when an enterprising editor seeks to add a token conservative, but that will be the moderate-conservative hybrid who is certain to not say anything too controversial that will anger the predominantly liberal staff and groups of friends with which they spend the most time.
In Houston think Bill King. Nationally think Jennifer Rubin.
Fox News skewed the other way, they hired commentators and reporters who self-identified as conservative, opening up the door to the for-profit talk-radio gang whose sole purpose was selling old people on gold instead of actually, I don't know, advancing the conservative agenda.
Talking heads like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham aren't conservatives, they're shills. In many cases they are akin to Donald Trump, parodies of conservatives as imagined by progressive thinkers. Coulter in particular is a beast of a human being, Hannity is a low-functioning idiot, Limbaugh is...well, special, and Ingraham reminds me of someone who's always trying to sit at the big kid's table, but can't follow the conversation closely enough to really fit in.
As such so-called "conservative" news has become a crap-fest full of shouting, fluid ideas that change with the tide and doomsday predictions whenever ratings start to sag. It's also served to dumb down the conservative movement, leading (in part) to the rise of Donald Trump.
On the Left things are worse (if you can believe that). It's telling that the only major newspaper that endorsed the Bronzed Ego was owned and operated by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. The remaining boards were incapable of even understanding why a significant portion of the population appealed to the Republican nominee.
And that's a problem.
Because when conservatives and liberals draw away from forums where they're forced to interact they are inexorably drawn to echo chambers where they're not. The alt-right, instead of being out there, in the open, letting everyone know exactly where they were and what they were thinking retreated to the relative safety of 4Chan, 8Chan etc. The Left retreated to the bizarro world of the Democratic Underground and both sides stopped listening.
This led to the new Right declaring everything with which they didn't agree unAmerican and it led to the rise of the Social Justice Warriors on the left. When you looked at it neither side had an appreciation or understanding of the motivations of the other and the media and politicians didn't really get it either.
Except for, Obama and (now) Trump, who utilized social media hidey-holes such as Twitter and Facebook to cause the distrust to fester, and to build support. They succeeded to a point that the members of the media "can't understand" why the right's revulsion toward Obama and the Left's revulsion toward Trump spring from the exact same place.
Of course, it would help if members of the media had a basic understanding of the American political system, but that's probably asking a little bit too much of them right now, in their depressed state.
