A religious war fought out every day in the headlines and at the newsstands

I came across an interesting quote by historian Johann Huizinga:

[the newspaper] fulfills in America the cultural function of the drama of Aeschylus. I mean that it is the expression through which a people-- a people numbering many millions-- becomes aware of its spiritual unity. The millions, as they do their careless reading every day at breakfast, in the subway, on the train and the elevated, are performing a ritual. The mirror of their culture is held up to them in their newspapers.

cited in Brown and Duguid, The Social Life of Information, (2000)

Huizinga was writing circa 1926. I doubt that he would see it this way today. Newspapers no longer reveal our "spiritual unity". Instead, they emphasize and exacerbate deep spiritual faultlines. On one side we see the worldview of the papers themselves: urban, secular, drenched in an upper middle-class liberalism. They are still confident in their elect status and the rightness of each and every one of their positions.

On the other side we have a large chunk of their current, former, and potential readership. They reject large portions of the worldview. Certainly religious faith and values issues mark faultlines. But you see the same divide on issues like gun control, crime, immigration, and multiculturalism.
The main issue is not so much the difference in viewpoint. It is that the newspapers rarely debate or seek to persuade those on the other side. Instead they ignore, dismiss, denigrate, and mischaracterize their positions.

Then there are the equivalent of agnostics: those (mostly the young) who will never participate in Huizinga's ritual of careless reading because they do not read much of anything.