posted by O-TrapSee, I think it's the other way around, and I'll tell you why.
News networks are, first and foremost, businesses. If there's not enough money to keep the lights on and the ownership happy, no information is going to get passed along.
As such, to some degree, the media outlets have an organic motivation for appealing to their target audience.
Now, if any significant subset of the population wanted the objective, unadulterated, Joe-Friday-style news, there'd be a market for a media outlet to provide that.
If there's a market for it, then there's money to be made with it, so a media outlet would fill that niche, whether it'd be a new one or whether one or more of the existing ones would transition in that direction.
However, the media outlets are really only becoming more polarized. That tells me that it's what the audiences want. There's a demand for media that agrees with them.
The market is just catering to the demand, same as it does in every other industry.
Because of the ‘information age’ and access to it, I think it is millions of people finally realizing that there is a whole lot of information that the MSM withholds/edits/skews, and so for about half the population trust has been completely lost. In short, the corrupt media drove millions to Fox News and elsewhere.