Ironically, more media I think has worsened the national conversation. We have more voices, but it makes it easier for fringe or biased, manipulative voices/sources to hijack the conversation to push an agenda or narrative.
The onslaught of the Internet media has killed or is killing professional journalism and the accountability in print it enshrined (whatever your political leanings newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post were excellent sources for news and hard facts). Whatever bias, these sources are dying and are being traded in for unreliable and incredibly skewed sources on the blogosphere or online media accumulation centers liking Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.
And cable news takes the worst aspects of politics--the horse race--and turns it into a national 24-hour sport. It is like ESPN for political junkies. And everyone has their team network, whether it be Fox or MSNBC. Thereby only listening to people they agree with and shutting out information that may hurt what they want to think.
Albeit, Fox takes it to a whole different level with the level of dishonesty and news manipulation. They have left the realm of bias and entered propaganda, imho.
And the above article pointing out how four of the major contenders for president on the GOP ticket (two of them, frontrunners!) are on Fox's payroll.
National discourse is dying for the rest of us. Oh well.
