The gilded age ran predominately from 1870s to 1890s countered in time by the effects of print newspapers golden age from 1880s-1900 on increasing growing literacy rates among the people.
Radio ruled in the 1920s and 1930s taking the nation from high wealth disparity of the 1920s through the Depression and into the New Deal Age as mass communication dramatically increased in speed raising awareness even among people who couldn't read, but could listen to FDR's Fireside chats.
TV ruled the roost in one form or another from the 1950s until the early 1990s, but it was different from print or radio in that it was highly restricted, top down, hypnotic, mass communication which ushered in the McCarthy Era, Cold War, and the pullback from the New Deal Era. Reagan a T.V. star would dramatically speed up the process of transferring wealth from the masses to the top income earners as he reduced top income tax rates from 70% to 28% during 1980s while tripling the national debt. Even today the President of the United States without a doubt the worst in U.S. history owes much of his rise to power due to misperceptions of his business acumen created by T.V. for years during the 1990s, ie: The Apprentice. He is television's last gasp.
The Internet; beginning in the mid-late 1990s to today a mass, near instantaneous, two way communication format driven in large part from the bottom up is the primary driving force giving opposition to, and exposure of the record breaking mass income and wealth disparity created and hidden for years by one way top down television from the general public. As a result the oligarchs of today are doing what they can to take over, manipulate, and or restrict information among the people on the strongest forum of democracy to the point that some of them smelling of desperation are trashing democracy itself, not to mention empathy.
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