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Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
I'm gonna borrow a line from Dvaut and suggest that this is the cart pushing the horse. Let's take it the other way around: Rather than saying Fox News put the whammy on millions of people, let's suppose that America is chock-full of racist olds who created a market for reactionary right-wing news and Fox showed up to fill that market. It's more like the people radicalized the media once the technology became able to give consumers a-la-carte media options for the types of media they consume.
I think the key point is that it is actually an insidious feedback loop where the racist instincts of America's worst people create a market for curated racist content, which in turn emphasizes and strengthens the racist instincts and grows the market.
One thing that market dogma has instilled in many people is the mistaken belief that markets always drive things towards equilibrium balance. This is a useful framework for analyzing plenty of economic situations, especially in Econ 101, but it is certainly not a universal truth.