Welcome to most modern journalism! Remember when every news org started spending time going to Twitter to get the general population's reactions (instead of actually interviewing real people and figuring out how actually widespread a viewpoint is)? It's been downhill from there.

Combined with most people only reading headlines, news organizations almost never providing context for most actual facts, and wealth concentration like we've never seen, the current state of news media is pretty dire.

You can get people to assume almost any cynical worldview you want when you can chip away at their belief in humanity by repeatedly showing only the worst examples of it. This is what conservative news media has been so good at - getting them to believe a specific image of "liberal" and allowing that image to represent ALL liberals instead of just the most extreme side. Honestly, it feels like most people on the left are similarly starting to use dehumanizing language to describe conservatives. All this leads to people avoiding communication because they assume that everyone on "the other side" believes insane nonsense. Sometimes they do. A lot of times, they don't.

I came in here ready to ask why someone's hot take gets to be legislation while my carefully thought out stuff is just thrown in the garbage. Turns out nobody's hot take is going anywhere.