Whether it meant to or not the Bush Administration kicked off a lot of terrible stuff for America and for the world. I remember obsessively watching the news after 9/11 and just having a terrible sinking feeling about the road we were preparing for ourselves.

To be a bit fair to them, it's easy to imagine many other administrations, of both parties, behaving similarly, though not in such an extreme way, after 9/11.

I'd like to think that Al Gore specifically, if he was President then, would not have invaded Iraq, and, would not have passed something like the Patriot Act, but the truth is we don't know.

Plus Gore might have paid more attention the the CIA warnings about Al Qaeda.

But again - who knows. And America itself has a lot to work on, on both sides of the political aisle.

Doesn't this describe every country?

That being said, in these cases media and politicians tend to align over time, either because media help compatible politicians, or because politicians created the media landscape themselves. Oligarchies tend to be symbiotic. For those close to power, anyway; for the rest of the country it’s more like parasitism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

IIRC Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman make the argument in "Manufacturing Consent" that basically consent can be manufactured in the U.S. because of the role that business and corporations play. Which is sort of a critique of capitalism, but I also recall Chomsky talking about how it's hard to really call the U.S. capitalist considering how much of the military industrial complex and academia (especially defense-related) is government funded, and how central those things are to the U.S. econonmy.

I'm not sure of the details but my takeaway is media consent can be manufactured in a corporatist/capitalist-like system, which may also be but is not necessarily an oligarchical one.

I think that concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-shrinking elite is a form of oligarchy.

Also the whole idea of a government / multinational divide gets a bit blurry, doesn't it, when you look at the longstanding U.S. government relationship with companies like G.E. , A&T, etc, and, I'm sure in one form or another, today with Google and Amazon.

I mean government-funded research created the tech giants.

Lastly, as much as people love to knock government, ideally it's how people organize to do stuff, and, has an accountability mechanism (elections).

I'm kind of riffing off of what you are saying but yeah. Power comes in many forms and can be abused in many forms.

It all boils down to defining the roles (on all sides) and then doing that job. It's when government, press, companies, or individuals make light of their responsibility that things fall appart.

Don’t answer the question, or call it out as a poor question.

There are many sources of news and media.

Name calling and attacks are not coming from just one side, but this doesn’t seem like an honest appraisal of how roles are being filled so much as just tribal finger pointing.

Where is the alternative or proposed solution? The person who possesses one of the biggest platforms and with the most reach in the world cannot articulate anything more substantive than complaining of persecution?

I found the exchange petty on both sides, but the media made much more of it.

This is not accurate.

The free press has the freedom to report however they want. That is the whole point of the free press.

If all you've got is two sensationalising ends and nothing in the middle, it's very difficult to tell what's going on. Worse, if you've got one broadly accurate and reliable wing opposed by a group who will intentionally exaggerate, lie, and demonise, and the public think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle, the latter group win.

What's not clear or easy is how you might go about cleaning up such a situation.

Look - I know it's hard to say this and remove the judgement from the statement, and I certainly do have my own judgement in play here, but, empirically speaking, President Donald Trump is racist. Or at the very least someone who consistently makes racist statements over time. And at that point what's the difference?

So w/regards to that I think reporters should have been saying that more, tbh. Let's review the facts:

1. Trump's comments about The Central Park 5, back in the day. 2. Trump's pivotal role in racist birther conspiracy theories about former President Obama. 3. Trump's racist language about Mexicans / Latinos, U.S. judges who happen to be Latino, his coded racist dog-whistle language about cities like Baltimore, Chicago, etc. 4. "Very fine people." 5. Every single thing he's done since the murder of George Floyd.

And I'm sure there's more.