In a world where a ceaseless barrage of information, opinion, advertising and spin makes not for clarity but confusion, it is inevitable that people will fall back on what their guts say to make decisions. The relentlessness of the news and opinion cycle is exhausting, and it gives people an uncomfortable sense of being manipulated by interests whose real agenda is unclear.
You would think that having more opportunities to be informed would have the opposite effect: that it would result in an education, by richness of resource, of informed opinion. Instead, the constant bewildering roar has a dumbing effect, a thought-numbing and distracting effect, which does no-one but the demagogues any good.