Dallas Morning-News reporter Christy Hoppe on trends in the media.

Christy Hoppe: The institutions that we've relied on, in our lifetimes at least, are disappearing. The some-called "mainstream media" has transformed itself. I mean, Fox News is now the largest viewership network for news right now and it rails against the mainstream media, but what is it other than the mainstream media?

Many grew up in an age of Walter Kronkite and Peter Jennings, and there were voices of some heft and gravitas who basically brought us all together, and you didn't think "He's a communist" or "He's a fascist" you just believed that there was some merit in what they were reporting and some factual-based reporting going on in there. I think we are becoming more and more polarized in this. We live in homogeneous neighborhoods, most of us, to a large extent. We listen to satellite radio to large extent, so we only have to listen to the music we want. We only listen to the news we want. More and more the sense of neighborhood and what's best for the country, which is what we're seeing in this healthcare debate, is somehow getting lost in the unity. That said, this nation started with a two-penny press in which you only bought the news that already agreed with your political viewpoint. So, I don't think it's a doomsday type of thing. I think we are going backwards in a certain reliability thing, but eventually it will all shake out.

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