The chaos we see in our discourse and politics for the last 100 years or so has been driven by the media. This includes both the media conglomerates and the influencers you see on social media on both sides of the political isle. It is completely toxic. What's dangerous is that our elected officials now take their cue from social media regarding their legislation and talking points.
Oswald Spengler predicted this in "The Decline of the West". He saw all politics as eventually driven by the "world press" and that "press agents" would be the true movers and shakers politically, with the politician as a passive go-between.
Here is Spengler on the "world press" in the winter of our civilization:
“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears. A forlorn little drop may settle somewhere and collect grounds on which to determine ‘the truth’- but what it obtains is just its truth. The other, the public truth of the moment, which alone matters for effects and successes in the fact-world, is today a product of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of presswork, and the “truth” is acknowledged by everybody. Its bases are irrefutable for just so long as money is available to maintain them intact. The Classical rhetoric, too, was designed for effect and not content- as Shakespeare brilliantly demonstrates in Antony’s funeral oration- but it did limit itself to the bodily audience and the moment. What the dynamism of our Press wants is permanent effectiveness. It must keep men’s minds continuously under its influence. Its arguments are overthrown as soon as the advantage of financial power passes over to the counter-arguments and brings these still oftener to men’s eyes and ears. At that moment the needle of public opinion swings round to the stronger pole. Everybody convinces himself at once of the new truth, and regards himself awakened out of error.
With the political press is bound up the need of universal school-education, which in the Classical world was completely lacking. In this demand there is an element- quite unconscious- of desiring to shepherd the masses, as the object of party politics, into the newspaper’s power-area. The idealist of the early democracy regarded popular education, without arriere pensée, as enlightenment pure and simple, and even today one finds here and there weak heads that become enthusiastic on the Freedom of the Press- but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world-press. Those who have learnt to succumb to their power, and the visionary self-determination of Late Democracy becomes a thorough-going determination of the people by the powers whom the printed word obeys.
In the contests of today, tactics consists in depriving the opponent of this weapon. In the unsophisticated infancy of its power the newspaper suffered from official censorship which the champions of tradition wielded in self-defense, and the bourgeoisie cried out that the freedom of the spirit was in danger. Now the multitude placidly goes its way; it has definitely won for itself this freedom. But in the background, unseen, the new forces are fighting one another by buying the press. Without the reader’s observing it, the paper, and himself with it, changes masters. Here also money triumphs and forces the free spirits into its service. No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target as indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. The Press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operations-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.”
As we can see, Spengler's prediction has come to pass. We shall see how this all plays out.