I think you're seeing competition in action. Before the Internet, there were 3 major broadcasting companies (4 after FOX gathered steam in the 80s) and one major newspaper per metro area. Ensuring the media's silence was as simple as making sure that all of the heads of these organizations knew that if they published, they would be the one organization that was shut out of all future news from the government.

Now, if the major news organizations don't publish something newsworthy but inconvenient for powerful people, they can be sure that it's going to show up on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wikileaks, or Reddit, or Breitbart, or HuffPo, or Gawker, or Hacker News, or somewhere. And if it's outrageous enough, it'll spread virally and the consequence will be that the media companies that missed it will look stupid, not that the information won't get out there.

There's still a lie by omission with the Yemen story though. You don't hear news outlets saying the truth which is that the Saudis are bombing Yemen with U.S weapons that we sold them knowing full well what they would be used to do.

It took me less than a minute to find this: http://time.com/4787797/donald-trump-yemen-saudi-arabia-arms...

"When President Donald Trump closed a nearly $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia on Saturday, his deputies’ spirits soared...The weapons sale was one of the largest in history, totaling close to $110 billion worth of tanks, artillery, radar systems, armored personnel carriers, and Blackhawk helicopters. The package also included ships, patrol boats, Patriot missiles, and THAAD missile defense systems. Much of that military hardware will likely be pressed into service in the Saudi fight against its neighbor Yemen, where more than 10,000 people have been killed over more than two years of heavy airstrikes and fighting."

...but the only they ran this story was to target Trump. ...and even still, what's happening in Yemen is barely mentioned. Obama was just as complicit with what was happening and no one published anything about it.

Are you kidding me? They might not report on it a lot, but that's almost _all_ I hear about it. I'd like to know more, because I'm aware it has to do with the Arab Spring but I'm not clear on who is involved (aside from the US and the Saudi governments) or what the ideas behind the political factions are.

[Edit: It's worth noting that those used to be only details we'd hear: who's a communist, who's a radical and who's a moderate, which individual people are monsters or the best hope for the country. To say the Chomsky critiques apply here is... a stretch. We got one story either essentially right or are making new mistakes.]

s/government/major wealthy-corporate interest/

It's for sale, but increasingly the buyers are not the USG anymore.

So do we fear the devil we know or the one we don't see yet?

Why stop there? There's tons of progressive bias as well. I don't know if it's a matter of progressive influence from the inside or fear of becoming the newest target of a progressive revolt that causes the major media outlets to toe the progressive line, but progressive bias seems at least as strong as pro-USG or pro-corporate bias. Maybe my vantage point is distorted/limited?

What do you mean by progressive bias? corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative.

Think of it as a separate axis.

Well, we were naming axes, weren't we? Government bias is a different axis from corporate bias from left/right political bias. It's odd to classify the first two as valid but not the last. If the problem is media distortion, it seems to me that progressive distortion is far greater than pro-business or pro-government distortion. I think we can agree that this much is true regardless of our opinions about how harmful each of these biases are.

> it seems to me that progressive distortion is far greater than pro-business or pro-government distortion

i don't know that these are directly comparable. it's like comparing a car's length to a truck's height. there may be some correlation, but they are distinct things.

You can compare a car's length to a truck's height; the units work out--whether or not its useful to do so is a different story (if you're playing tetris with cars and trucks, it might be very useful!). In particular, we can (and probably do) measure the magnitudes of the media's biases (pro-business, pro-government, progressive) and compare them, and it's very useful, for example, if you care about media bias and want to know what kind of pressure to apply to get the most bang for your finite political capital.

> corporate vs. normal people is orthogonal the progressive vs. conservative.

No, it's not. Both are about flattening of power distribution vs. concentration of power distribution.

Progressive and conservative are an odd nomenclature nowadays. Both "sides" have large populist elements that share a hatred (and conspiratorial paranoia) of globalism and "the elites".

In this respect, ANTIFA and alt-right white-nationalists have a lot more in common than they'll admit.

That white nationalists (at the grassroots, even before considering what ends they might be being manipulated to serve) are about concentrating power in a specific subgroup rather than distributing it in an egalitarian manner is, well, painfully obvious from their overt label.

It's true that just as both those seeking a broader distribution of power and those seeking to move it from the aristocracy to the mercantile class shared a small degree of common interest in the downfall of feudalism, the anarchocommunists and other leftists at the heart of Antifa and the White Nationalists in Trump's base might have something of a common opponent in at least some segment of the current cosmopolitan corporate elite, but that is a weak and transitory common interest, and their general interests are fundamentally in near-polar opposition.

There is no contradiction between the desire to achieve a flatter distribution of power, while also concentrate it in a specific subgroup. It's exactly these things that are the goals of Steve Bannon's wing of the right.

The commonality between the anti-fascists (or whatever they want to call themselves) and white-nationalists is neither weak nor transitory. Their common enemy is liberal democracy, and their preferred strongmen will not always necessarily be different. Take a glance at places like Serbia and Russia to see this in action.

Back to the original point though, I think progressive vs conservative is not a useful basis with which to analyze these movements.

Progressives are at war with everyone rather equally; so I don't see the utility in insisting on a unidimensional axis. They claim to be opposed to white nationalists specifically, but then they go on to categorize literally everything to their right (including liberalism) as white supremacy. And I say "equally" because progressives spend more time criticizing moderates than the extreme right.

Further, I question the sincerity of the progressive commitment to equality, since the mob comes after anyone who points to data that don't support their apocalyptic narrative.