Media for free has produced a system where the only sustainable business model is producing, effectively, propaganda for people who have a bunch of spare cash lying around and want to invest in your media if you're willing to promote their narrative.
At the same time, the tools of constructing an imaginary worldview and convincing your viewers / readers that that imaginary reality is what's going on have gotten incredibly more powerful. And there's a huge incentive to do it, because if you can do it well enough you can win elections and gain access to a river of money that is literally billions of dollars.
It would be weird if there weren't a bunch of people walking around with this weird constructed narrative in their heads that they think is reality. But it's still super jarring when you run into them and their picture has some kind of confluence with the actual real world and you can see how wrong it is in reality.