A lot of very young people often try to be as cool and detached as possible. How foolish really. I think it is important to save some empathy for later but I believe part of it is just growing up and realizing you cannot change everything and not feeling empathy towards everything is a form of self defense. I believe it is difficult to attribute this to media consumption but there very well could be a part to that. It is intuitive at least.

On the other hand I try to compare it to the empathy of people that were not exposed to anything like the free media on the internet. And often they don't show increased levels of empathy either, often quite to the contrary.