That's true, but I'm not sure that that's different from before either. As technology and wealth progressed, that has likely been true plenty of times. I'm not

That's true, but I'm not sure that that's different from before either. As technology and wealth progressed, that has likely been true plenty of times. I'm not convinced that anything has fundamentally changed, and I don't think that the population made decisions by being informed. Instead, they were being informed and that formed their decision. Does it matter that we now have 8000 TV channels readily available? Is that meaningfully different from having 50? Sure, we now have the internet which is theoretically a two-way-medium (but for most users, it's one-way), and that may change some things and make the whole system more fragile, because it's much harder to control a narrative and suppress information now, but I don't see it changing the basic relationship between citizenry and media (at least not yet).