No, people who are older than 40 still grew up in newspaper world. Yes, the internet existed, but it didn't have the deluge of terrible content until well into the new millennium, and you couldn't get that content portable until roughly when the iPhone became ubiquitous. A lot of content at the time was simply the newspaper or national TV station, on the web. It was only later that you could virally share awful content that was formatted like good content.

Now that isn't to say that just because something is a newspaper, it is good content, far from it. But quality has definitely collapsed, overall and for the legacy outlets.

I am not quite 40, but not that far off. I can’t really imagine being a young adult during their era where newspapers fell apart and online imitators emerged, experiencing that process first-hand, and then coming out of that ignorant of the poor media environment. Maybe the handful of years made a big difference.