It wasn’t perfect but you're far too quick to reject the point about radicalization. Mass media had to be, well, mass and that meant that there was more of a centrist bias because advertisers didn’t want to be associated with fringe viewpoints. Before personalized advertising, if you sponsored something objectionable everyone knew it – quite different from where nobody sees the same ads and they can usually blame the marketplace for placements which attract criticism.
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.
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.