...many people are comfortable in their bubble and made that point in my previous post. That's a function of capitalism creating a product that caters to consumer preferences -- i.e., "news" skewed in a particular direction. It's at least as much entertainment as news.

I'm old enough to remember the pre-cable days -- and certainly pre-Internet days -- where everyone got their news from NBC, CBS or ABC (and maybe PBS), coupled with their newspaper. In those days, everyone was more on the same page than today in terms of what was "news" and "reality" in the sense that the product they were presented with was monolithic. It's like in the old Henry Ford Model T days: If you thought about what a car was, then you'd think a car was a black Model T that cost $100, but obviously that's not true in reality .

While everyone might have been discussing the same stories/facts pre-cable/pre-Internet, they weren't necessarily discussing "reality" because the monolithic news they were consuming was still only coming from one establishment point of view. Stories were covered in a certain way, and many stories weren't covered at all.

So, were we better off then? Were we better off agreeing on one "reality" that wasn't really reality, or are we better off now having unlimited information and opinion made available to us to sort out reality on our own? I think we are better off today even though we are dealing with a different set of problems than we were then.