I do believe it's been this way for a while. Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988. (There's a movie out there created in 1992 if you don't want to read the book). Basically the same factors at work then are the same factors at work today -- just escalated with an algorithm.
There is an objective reality -- it's just that people are too lazy to go find it.
I wouldn’t call people lazy for being unable or unwilling to find out the objective reality. What domains offer enough rewards to do that for? A proper quest towards objective reality costs you from weeks to a lifetime. Humans are satisficers, not optimizers.
I'd frame it differently.
Everyone has their personal lives to deal with, as well as their personal interests. Everyone has their priority queue to deal with their daily life. If no one ever watch a specific newspice then that person will be completely oblivious to it, and if they watch it then they have far more important things to do than fact checking something that's not even in their priority queue.
I feel that this problem is actually being presented backwards. People push stories because they want to force upon the public specific points of view over very specific topics. Call it editorialization, call it propaganda. It's the same thing. Failing to see a point of view pushed onto the public is not a problem from the individual's standpoint, nor something that affects people's lives. The only people that are impacted by this are those who stand to benefit from manipulating the public.
Can anyone recommend something similar?
It is not that Truth is impossible to find, rather that undeceiving the self is difficult.
I feel that people are misrepresenting the issue. What they seek is not the objective truth. This is about politics, and the goal is to impose their will onto others, whether they are onboard ir not. Consequently, "seeking the truth" is being used as an euphemism for "persuade to join my political cause to further my personal political goals". Hence the army of militants who insist that the hypothetical existence of a mythical laptop is relevant because that is the propaganda wedge to dislodge a political rival from holding office.