It may be a false impression, but my opinion is that in the U.S. the vitriol around politics became noticeably greater beginning with the Clinton administration. And I don’t mean that the Clinton administration itself increased the rhetoric and nonsense, but the general discussion became more emotional and hateful.
Also, and I don’t know when this changed, but I also think the ability to get the actual news from newspapers decreased significantly in the not-too-distant past. I will readily admit that this may simply be the result of the fact that for the first time I probably disagree with the most basic underlying views of the editors and reporters of the newspapers I used to read, and thus I just recently noticed the fact that newspapers rarely report on political news without including some sort of bias. The primary between H. Clinton and Obama really gave me a new sympathy for long-running complaints by Republicans about media bias. I had to stop reading the Washington Post entirely, and never started again, because the coverage was so biased I couldn’t take it.
Finally, one day I am going to try to understand what phrases like “'politically correct' speech codes" mean. I imagine that is not a topic for this thread, but whenever someone uses the term "politically correct" I immediately think "hmm, I'm not going to agree with that person on too many things."
