Ah, the golden age of news! Remember evenings spent gathered around the television, listening intently as Walter Cronkite delivered the day's headlines in a calm, reassuring voice? Back then, there might have been a slight conservative lean here, a touch of liberalism there, but by and large, Americans were presented with a relatively shared set of facts. Sure, some news outlets leaned a little one way or another, but for the most part, there was a sense of common ground. This sense of shared reality, this foundation of "what happened" wasn't always perfect, mind you, but it allowed for a national conversation based on the same basic information.