Not mutually exclusive. The news heavily optimizes for pageviews and one way of doing that is to optimize for anger. (Other than awe, which is hard to generat

Not mutually exclusive. The news heavily optimizes for pageviews and one way of doing that is to optimize for anger. (Other than awe, which is hard to generate, anger has been shown in studies to be the most viral emotion.) However, they wouldn't have any raw materials for this if certain folks in government weren't routinely doing stuff worthy of anger. Trump and the mainstream news media exist in this unhealthy symbiosis, where they create this toxic emotional environment for a whole country because both of them would fade away into nothingness if they didn't.