Comment by PuppyTailWags

I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed volcano eruptions on the Affordable Care Act. So on and so forth. It's spurious to claim that outrage bait on television hasn't messed up people's brains just because the internet is doing a better job at it. They're just modeling what television was already successfully doing.