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You could go back to Andy Jackson, too, but until after WWI this was a nation of regions Regional markets, regional newspaper powerhouses, regional politics and so on with a national market still struggling to replace the regionalism that was the dominate force prior to WWI.

After WWII, though, everyone and everything focused on eliminating regional cohesion and regional markets turning the US into a single nearly monolithic audience. Regionalism was nearly dead when the Dixiecrat movement tried to rebuild at least a part and failed.

That's what the Boomers grew up in, a nation where massive effort was being put into totally destroying regionalism and local interests whether it was through cookie cutter news at six or ever more common national chains like K-mart and McDonalds replacing both Mom & Pop business and regional chain stores.

By the eighties, same pizza, same hamburger, and same clothes for sale in Anchorage, Beloxi, Casper, Dodge City, etc. Nothing to disturb the self-image Boomers had drummed into them to convince them they were all part of the same happy, wonderful, Californication that everyone else was a part of. Cookie cutter hippies gave way to cookie cutter yuppies gave way to the next nationally advertised self-image available at any magazine rack and on every television channel 24/7.

The only skepticism left was at the occasional 'Bridge Too Far' ad when the lady of the house responded negatively because she knew that no matter which swimsuit she chose she wasn't going to weigh twenty pounds less and be walking a leopard down the beach in Jamaica any time no matter what she wore.

You could go back to Andy Jackson, too

The telegraph was a disruptive technology.
I mean that in the sense that it took a cultural shift to get used to the possibility of essentially instantaneous transcontinental communication. The two big “killer apps” of the telegraph were:

Wire news services, and
Command and control of the railroads.
I have discussed the effect of the wire services, and will do so further. But to fathom the change in mindset that instantaneous communication beyond the line of sight made, consider the origin of the use of telegraph in command and control of the railroads. It seems that a VP of a railroad line was traveling, and - as often happened - his train came to a stretch of single-track line. His train waited on the siding for sight of the train slated to use that stretch of track next - coming in the opposite direction of his train. Train accidents happened all the time, and they especially happened when an engineer failed to wait for an opposite-direction train to pass before getting on a single track stretch of railroad.
So, our VIP sat around cooling his heels while the engineer, following mandatory protocol, waited for the oncoming train to pass. And he waited. And he waited. And he waited.
Finally, he had enough - and finally he used the telegraph (telegraph lines always used RR right of way to string their wires) to ask the stationmaster what the story was. He was told that the train in question was being repaired. He replied that his train would be using that line of track, and that the oncoming train was on no account to proceed until his train cleared it. Then he directed the engineer of his train to proceed. The engineer flatly refused. If you valued your life, you simply did not do that. And the engineer could not be persuaded by the VP of his company to proceed. The VP finally said, OK. You get in the caboose where you’ll be safe, and I’ll run the train into the next station. And that was the origin of command and control of trains via telegraph.
The story illustrates the cultural shift involved in telegraph communication. It was spooky to be able to do that. We are culturally different from that engineer; we think nothing at all of communicating worldwide without even a wire. The point is that we constantly receive messages over vast distances - from people that we don’t even know, any more than you know me (but, internet joke to the contrary notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure I know you are not a dog).
The trouble is that the journalists have exploited that cultural shift by claiming a form of omniscience (“journalistic objectivity”) and, because it was in the interest of every journalist on every wire service, have successfully conducted a massive propaganda campaign persuading the public to buy it. People are so hooked on knowing “what is going on” that they will believe just about anything from a journalist. And journalists, for their part at least historically, have restricted their deceit primarily to half-truths rather than outright lies. With the internet, that system seems to be breaking down.