Which is also why the trust in the institutions that give people airtime is virtually nonexistent, and people on the internet, sometimes those censored experts and sometimes people masquerading as censored experts, are getting all the attention.

You've touched one of the real veins of this issue that very few really want to talk too loud about. There are still a handful of good journalists doing good work out there, but they seem to have been shoved over into "crazy man on a blog ranting" corner, making it much easier for propagandized coincidence theorists to shut down all discussion from them as crazy conspiracy theories.

I think a good analysis of the history and changing landscape of media is highly in order if we want to get to the bottom of this.

As for me, I like to remind people of Operation Mockingbird quite a bit lately, and rest assured the name just got changed after the Church Committee and given the explosion of the internet they are certainly extremely pervasive in the new system.

As CIA director William Casey said: "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

Well yes that’s the point. By literal definition the people who were so obviously wrong weren’t experts.

But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.

That's not the way I remember it at all. The government were very obviously going into war because they wanted to and scrabbling around for anyone who would support them. You only have to look at the death of David Kelly.

> Lawmakers knew from the beginning the shakiness of the Bush administration’s case for going to war with Iraq, and Biden not only went along with it, he championed it.

- https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/15/20849072/...

> [Biden] was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position.

- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-bi...

More?

> Iraq in 2002 was devastated by economic sanctions, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was known by even the most pro-war experts to have no missiles that could come close to the United States. The idea that this country on the other side of the world posed a security threat to America was more than far-fetched. The idea that the US could simply invade, topple the government, and take over the country without provoking enormous violence was also implausible. It’s not clear how anyone with foreign policy experience and expertise could have believed these ideas.

> Senator Dick Durbin, who sat on the Senate intelligence committee at the time, was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said.

- Also from the Guardian link.

And that's just war. We were lied to about sugar; about margarine, about recycling, about oil spills, about agricultural pollution, about public transport. We were lied to about trade, espionage, healthcare. Repeatedly, barefacedly. Lies are the most bipartisan issue in America.

In the face of all this, we're told the enemy is distrust itself, told to trust the science, told to believe that Biden and the Dems are fighting for us. We're told anti-war news outlets and comedians are secretly communist, Russian funded. It's all such utter wank.