We used to have a neutral ground of, say, a respected newspaper or TV show which had the ability to reign in radicalization, and would present issues by weighing both sides in a fair and representative way. This does no longer exist. It's us-vs-them, the other side is evil. Additionally our competitive society has no issue with creating and vilifying classes of losers and accepts a growing divide between rich and poor.
There you have your shooters. There you have Trump 2024 or who else comes along (what kind of politician can only thrive in this climate?)
My solution? I'd recommend everyone to smoke or drink some of your favorite drug or play some peaceful music and meditate over why the other side from your perspective is human, and what valid arguments they could have, or what made them think the way they do.
No, we didn't.
We used to have oligopolistic media with a fairly uniform set of biases and actively-pursued agendas across all outlets. Even farther back, media was more diverse and often hyperlocal, but still not “fair and representative”.
Similarly in Germany we used to have only had 3 state TV channels, ultimately controlled by the ruling parties. Thinking about it now, I'm sure it was quite biased in all kinds of ways. And yet, people got their vaccinations without rioting.
That doesn’t mean it was perfect but it absolutely did temper things a lot - they had to setup their own network to host a voice like Carlson for a larger national audience than Stormfront.
The U.S. also had a legal requirement to fairly present multiple sides of an issue until Republicans removed it in 1987. It is probably not a coincidence that this was around the same time that a handful or very wealthy people started pouring money into building highly-partisan networks.