"Our entire system of government lives on the basis of a dying industry."

"Our entire system of government lives on the basis of a dying industry. A system of representative government depends on an informed citizenry, and this in turn depends on institutions that bring them reliable information. When those institutions collapse and radically shrink, we can’t expect our system of government to just go on functioning, and this is behind some of the current dysfunction you see in our system....
    "You can say that the old 'mainstream media' was biased and deserves whatever happens to it. I wouldn’t, because for all its bias, I have always depended on the real reporting that is done by that media. The world is a big place, and a lot of things are happening in it. We need large institutions capable of reliably gathering and disseminating that information.
    "Moreover, the factors causing the collapse of the news media had nothing to do with its bias ... and they are making partisan bias worse. ...
    "People are increasingly getting their news from social media platforms such as Facebook or the platform formerly known as Twitter. But social media tends to be segmented by preexisting partisan loyalties; the algorithms feed us what fits our biases. Social media also tends to be dominated by political obsessives and fanatics, who post far more content than regular people.
    "So instead of news presented in a balanced way to a wide audience, social media feeds us whatever entrenches and exaggerates our existing loyalties....
    "...[T]his has been one of the big disappointments of the past few decades... Criticising 'the media' was a large and lively genre on the right, to which I have made my own contributions over the years. But when the right got the chance to build its own media institutions, it started out proclaiming itself 'fair and balanced' and ended up building a system of crude partisan propaganda. ... The complaint [from the right] that the mainstream media is biased turned out just to be a complaint that it’s not biased towards [their team]."

~ Robert Tracinski from his thinkpieces 'The Dying Industry on Which Our System Lives' and 'The Collapse of Media Leaves Us Flying Blind'