i know what you're talking about tho. pretty much, this means the topic is well discussed and not subject to censorship.
A notable case was the unraveling of the whole Iraq WMD story, and especially the yellowcake affair. I suspect that this was notable precisely because well-informed Americans could see BBC et al covering it via the internet while the US media largely ignored it, though; pre-internet cases of media self-censorship would have been far less visible.
In an environment where the Guardian, Daily Mail and various other foreign papers have massive US market penetration via the internet, this sort of thing is probably way less useful; media self-censorship will only be useful for the section of the population who get their news solely from TV (or where the entire global media colludes to censor something, but that seems far less likely).
This was major news in the US in my recollection. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/what-i-didn-t-fin... is about the yellowcake.
A pro-war pundit then outed Wilson’s spouse as a CIA employee and there was a widely publicized special counsel investigation into the matter of the outing that was discussed a lot at the time.
So I don’t really understand the idea that the US media as a whole was self-censoring this...
It's a cute little "conspiracy theory" for the masses to play with, nobody in power is threatened in the slightest. In many ways it's self-neutered by turning that phrase into a mindless meme.
The soft censorship means we've seen effectively zero mainstream investigation into any of the glaringly obvious questions.
No need to censor any truth anymore, if it simply does not reach anyone because it is burried in a huge pile of garbage information, most people have not the time sorting it through.any
Discussions isn't the point though. Articles in big newspapers and TV stations, not forum chitchat.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...
a More concrete example is "On February 8, 2018, it was reported that Qatari leaders had reassured the leaders of Jewish American organisations that Al Jazeera would not be airing its companion documentary series on the Israel lobby in the United States. According to Haaretz, the Qatari government had reportedly hired Republican Senator Ted Cruz's former aide Nicolas Muzin to open communications channels with Jewish American organisations. Earlier, the network had sent letters to several American pro-Israel organisations informing them that their employees would appear in the documentary. These letters generated speculation that the Qatari government had reneged on its earlier promise to block Al Jazeera from screening the controversial documentary which, like the earlier British series, had utilized clandestine footage and recordings of pro-Israel activists." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lobby_(TV_series)
Please, it's much older than the US. Better examples of young (and failing) democracies would be Russia and Central Asian -stan countries.
In Poland an anti-government song disappears from the playlist, and it's a huge scandal. In US a convicted pedophile with own pedo-island, and connections all over the elites, media and government disappears from the prison cell in a dubious suicide where all cameras stopped working and many other "coincidences" happened and not much happens about it.
In US the government is the puppet of the ruling class so there's really no need for it to do any fighting. It just does what it was told (paid) to do. And the media have almost full control over the public opinion, so there is no need for any silly black-listing censorship. All they have to do is to gently steer the attention of the public elsewhere.