Got to love how binary and self-assured everyone is online (including me, I confess
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This is actually an "interesting" byproduct of online discussions. I am not completely sure where that comes from, although it seems kind of obvious that the relative anonimity, and even when you give your real name, the "shield" you get by being behind a screen, both favor that behavior.
Yet another factor, I think, is the "mob" effect - that you can of course also get IRL, but given the number of people online compared to the number of people you typically interact with IRL, it's just amplified a lot. You can often see two groups of people form over almost any kind of discussion, with radically opposite opinions, and the more people in each group, and the more people get opiniated.
As to the original question I don't know really. I don't have the figures needed for that. Like in any situation of this kind, we would have to know exactly what Google brings to the traditional media, not just what it takes from them, and see where the balance lies.