>What this taught me is that the media's primary role is to polarise people to either the left or the right so that they can be herded to vote along or act along prescribed lines.

It has nothing to do with voting or acting. It has everything to do with locking in another consistent reader (aka "ad viewer"). If you can get someone ideologically driven, they become hooked, and you can stroke their ego by feeding them confirmation bias news. It becomes addictive, where the person gets hooked on news that tells them they are right.

All of that just to get them to scroll past or listen to ads multiple times a day.

I genuinely believe if we could scooby-do style pull off the mask of who is destroying the country, it would be the media. I have seen too many people in my life (and seemingly everyone online) go off the ideological deep-end because they fell into the media's ad-farming psy-op game.