What are the signs and effects of this activist media? Who are its players? Are there sides? What are they?
In general I have trouble believing it’s the medias fault though, not that they’re without sin, I just think the forces that make something like this are bigger than the media.
It certainly was re: journalism.
When we only had the big three TV networks vying for our eyeballs, they each used news as a way to attract the broadest set of Americans. The nightly news was a loss leader, in the hopes that we'd watch the rest of the evening's programming/ads on that network.
The "unbiased" business didn't really exist until someone could be in all of our homes building rapport with our families every night. And cable, then more so the web, completely disrupted that.
There used to be many, many more newspapers, with room for distinction as the paper of record for any given demographic. Radio, then more so TV, put an end to most of those.