I agree with your post, except for this last bit. I think we're saying the same thing, but we DID have the ability to engage deeply far in the past, when there was a smaller scope of knowledge required to understand policy. We now have too many facts, and too many policies and haven't needed to deal with any of it for a long time.
In the past we had just a couple of major news networks, and they took their jobs seriously. We had one, or maybe two newspapers, and then we had encyclopedias. The first two sources basically were responsible and conservative in how they reported things (most of them) and didn't inundate us with stuff like who was sleeping with whom, even if they were politicians. Now every moron can go on the internet and set himself up on a blog with unknown sources that 'prove' whatever they want to prove. Then someone reads that on Facebook and next thing you know is repeating it in outraged comments to other people.