In fact, this episode of Freakanomics talks about The Politics Industrial Complex and how The Media is on the inside of that bubble. In short, without a healthy and objective Fourth Estate there is no democracy. Add in the duopoly one-party choices and it gets even worse.

There's more to democracy than getting to vote. What we're living is the Orwellian defintion of democracy.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/im-your-biggest-fan/

I also heard it said on another reputable podcast - I think it was "How I built this" - that the top corporate guest of the Obama WH was Google. I'm trying to verify that. This looks close enough.

It's odd that a POTUS who sold hope would be so closely aligned with a surveillance company.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

See also: "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" for a look behind Google's public facing narrative.

The Pentagon keeps failing its audits, to the tune of trillions of dollars, and the people are silent. Trillions? If it walks like corruption and talks like corruption...well we all should see where this is going. Yet, zero opposition to this?

That's enough for now.

This is laughably biased. Whatever his defects, the election of Trump was if anything a much better example for democracy in action than the forced-along Biden election in which as much as possible of the mainline media and tech companies did everything possible to ensure it went that way.

Trump legitimately upset the applecart by winning (even if it was an electoral college victory, it was nonetheless part of how the system formally works) and surprised many people including a majority of the media landscape fully against his campaign. Because you detest that particular president's politics (im no fan of them either in many ways) doesn't make it an antidemocratic step backward..