Thanos Thanos:
Like I said before, read up on the French Revolution and the role the revolutionary press of "citizen journalists" played in setting off a perpetual-motion machine of a murderous bloodbath with their incessant slander and demonization of their social enemies, where justice & law had fled the scene altogether and baseless accusation ruled every moment. It's pretty much an exact cut-and-paste job to what's going on today in extremist circles. All it's missing is the blood clogging the gutters and the severed heads, but the way things are going (especially in the US) it's really only a matter of time until the real atrocities happen.
I don't disagree, particularly about the purity spiral that led the revolutionaries to start guillotining each other for not being "pure" enough (something which is happening less-lethally in far-left and far-right political circles today) but Joseph Pulitizer and William Randolph Hearst's competition for newspaper sales led critics to coin the term "yellow journalism" for their sensastionalistic headlines. 19th-century Canada was rife with politicians, including the Fathers of Confederation and their opponents, using newspapers to advocate for their political goals and projects. Today we have the likes of the Broadbent Institute or the Manning Centre for Building Democracy closely affiliated with various political parties.
That said, print media and TV shows did not have the capacity for instant responses and speaking directly to politicians, actors, etc. that we do today. The real problem with social media may simply be the sheer volume of crap that gets produced, with the loudest voices getting an disproportionate amount of attention and making everyone who could be associated with them look bad.