> The current political climate has mainly happened because capital interest has taken control of unregulated news and opinion.

We're seeing the opposite, though. As the traditional media companies declined and the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.

As someone who tries to avoid the news and politics, it's pretty easy to avoid the companies selling them. But I keep running into them because there are lots of users on Hacker News/Reddit/etc. who try to interject it into every discussion they can . Invariably, these people don't come at it from the point of view that they might be wrong and the other side might be right; they act like zealous crusaders on a mission to vanquish evil.

So polarization wasn’t an issue when segregation was the law in much of the south with separate schools, water fountains, entrances?

I don't dissagree, but I think I'm using "news and opinion" more loosely. To my mind, facebook putting your sister's political rant into your feed above your uncle's fishing pictures, is a kind of wauly of profiting from devisive political opinion. Even if it is more subtle than the NYT publishing a think piece.

> the masses gained a greater ability to voice their own views, polarization increased.

It is the bot farms voicing opinions IMO. For regular people one account equals one human, and it is a difficult feeling to uproot for many people.