Its not at all about ad revenue in the consolidated lie business The US has 6 oligarch owned and controlled firms that run its fake media. Oligarchs don't just own and control through direct or indirect ownership and interlocking boards (which used to be illegal) often times when they give money to these firms in the form of as money they are if course giving their own money to themselves because they own and control the media firms. But it always to reinforce their ill-gotten illegitimate power by using censorship including drowning out to misinform the public about vital matters of public interest. Think of it as anti education Buts its worse than that. Look up project Mockingbird. Then think about what that has meant since Buckley v Valejo and Citizens United in the face of the loss of anti-corruption doctrines like the free speech doctrine and the fairness doctrine. And look at rankings of press freedom (remember it was never about freedom of speech for a press but the right of citizens to have reasonable free speech and to be informed among themselves- no to privilege filtering or make lying and censoring profitable.) Look at precedent setting suit in Florida of Fox vs its own anchors on behalf of damn Monsanto resulting in Fox and the media have the right to mislead the public about matters of critical public interest for profit. Look at the loss of net neutrality. That is critical because that is about keeping censorship and lying from being profitable and leading to sponsored black mailed pre-selected candidates. But look at press freedom rankings in the US by world watchdogs- plummeting since the Patriot Act (for oligarchs) and all the crap NDA riders. US is heading toward the bottom. But what we have today are lawyer types who represent these bad actor real threat to democracy oligarchs never endingly through what they consider relatable or charismatic but generally boob like human ads media personalities in court of public opinion and they are always defending the bad behavior indirectly and trying to cultivate sympathy for dishonesty, selling out and selfishness or create a society more friendly to psychopaths through glorification of their actions and agendas. Also have to remember that consolidated media is monolithic. They reference each others bs in circle jerk fashion and they keep some out of the fud stream so they can use those shills to position the strategic lie. They also put paid shill like laugh tracks behind their bs stories in the comments sections to try to convince people its consensus and forgone. Here is a test. Ask yourself what the average American citizen know about the developed world's best health care system that has half the cost of the US system per-capita but by far the best outcomes in the world and has been that way in that spot for about 50 years since the US was the former record holder, when the US also then had the equivalent of single payer. That country has the most credible health care system and health care. Ask yourself what the average American knows about that major global player's policy on vaccines since the 90s- hint they dropped them and convinced most of the world to follow suit only the US and France really abstained. Yep, that's Japan and it hasn't regretted it never looked back- doing good in the pandemic- it bought some Moderna but hasn't used it apparently. Ask what the average American knows about Vietnam's experience in the pandemic and claim of about 0 casualties out of 100 million people. There is kind of a pattern here- we started to lose the free press around the time of the Powell memo and the oil embargo and if you look back it was then that we started to lose the safety net and the lies around fossil fuels really started ramping then. Recently its gotten so bad that even academic freedom is gone. We know about John Taylor Gatto's finding of intentional dumbing down of K1-12 we don't even teach history or civics!!! But even academic freedom ia gone. A Koch oligarch controlled piece of sht like ALEC can not only override the legislative process it can use bribery or private grants (maybe even funded by evaded taxes) or one of their philanthropic entities can use the same to force professors to use their damn department head dictated grant conditional books or lose tenure and lose tenure based on how well the students said the professor followed the Koch propaganda in the book- and public Universities in the US are allowing this so you get damn infomercial sponsored spam as education and debt for the privilege. Its happened in the med schools especially with the unnecessary price out of reach debt levers. And the anti kickback laws on drugs have been overridden and pharma can now sponsor! And nothing worse than sponsor skewed search- that is the dumbest thing imaginable. We have a few generations of rent seeking silver spooners whose only cultivated skill is bribery. Its why with automation it is so critical to allow people to opt out of all the wage and debt slavery with a real UBI- but not a basic income but a sufficient income all else is a life of duress ransomed and held at gun point from birth. Our media needs to be completely reworked to eliminate all conflicts of interest as its highest never ending priority.
