What I want to know (since I am not an American), is whether this type of thinking and "talking past each other" existed pre-FOX News? Do you think it has always existed in America, and one major news organization capitalized off of it?
America's always had a strain of anti-government, conspiracy-theory thought running through it. Fox News just capitalizes on the most recent varieties of this, which were popularized in the '50s and '60s, during the Cold War and the counter-cultural movement. The ideas of people like John Birch, Ayn Rand, and Jerry Falwell became very popular among some segments of the American population during this time. News Corp. apparently thought there were still enough people around in the '90s who thought like this to support a cable news channel which would present these views as "news," and, it appears, they were right.