Media, because I believe the media just provides what the market demands.

I don’t think in terms of being better or worse - nostalgia always distorts those judgements anyway. But the Model T analogy doesn’t work for me. An informed electorate is critical to our republic, unlike varieties of cars. To any democracy. The difference back in the day is news was a loss leader. It was a public service in exchange for broadcast rights. The reason why we didn’t face the same challenges is that we lived in the same reality. In that world, we did not tend to think of political opponents as enemies. They were the constructive opposition.

Today’s world doesn’t simply provide different realities. It provides incentives to misinform, and has gone interactive so that positive reinforcement closes out other perspectives. More than was the case back in the day when we had 3 networks and a newspaper or two.

It’s not about better or worse. But it is about polls indicating that half of us think civil war is inevitable. Regardless of polling problems I find that deeply troubling. It would have been unimaginable to me a very short time ago. So I just think we have unprecedented challenges, and until we figure out how to reconcile our different realities, just to the point of at least tolerating our different perspectives, society’s problems become practically unsolvable.