No, this isn't true. The media--social and traditional--knows exactly what it's doing. The media puts whatever causes the most outrage and therefore clicks and shares and profit in front of our faces. And isn’t afraid to lie to do so. If we just uncritically abosrb it, we end up absolutely clueless about the facts of almost any issue. I’m regularly astonished by this effect as I do research for articles.

Take, just as an example of something I'm looking at closely at the moment, the Rittenhouse case. Depending on which way your politics lean, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were reading about completely different cases. I'm watching people argue with absolute conviction about things that are demonstrably wrong, because they just haven't bothered to listen to anything but the takes that follow what they already want to believe.

It's the current tendency to look for information that fits our beliefs, instead of forming our beliefs around the best available information, that's the problem. And the media deliberately feeds that tendency. Don't get me wrong, I still think people need to take responsibility for what they believe. But the media is far from blameless.