Whistleblowers are allowed to have an agenda. In practice most do. But for society it's better that shady stuff get revealed than them staying hidden because the whistleblower is not a paragon of morality.
The idea that journalist are not perfect, therefore they are terrible and entirely untrustworthy is much more dangerous than any journalist’s corruption.
The idea that it used to be better a century ago is laughable.
The fairness doctrine meant that when they aired something considered controversial, they had to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint. That didn't mean they had to be fair, since everybody got latitude on what was considered controversial i.e. if they ban you for something on twitter now, it wouldn't have been "controversial" then, it would have been settled, so you'd get no time without at least going to court over it. Also, they could just give some objector 2 minutes to make their case into a camera and play it during the news.
The things that would end up being "controversial" are things that your local Chamber of Commerce or an international fossil fuel lobbying group would find controversial.
Its scary how easy you think it is to dictate actual fairness and impartiality in law, though. The only places that have laws like that are extremely authoritarian and corrupt, like Zimbabwe.
Moreover the government had embeds and was in communication with social media and traditional coordinating what to disseminate and what to suppress.
The. You have more dignitaries at the WEF and UN COP saying how wonderful it was that Covid prepared people and provided for better government control…
If you think the government phone-calling people at social media companies flagging specific instances and people for "misinformation" is not a form of intimidation, then you need to familiarize yourself with the legal precedent here.
In summary, there is no link so to speak of. There are leaked DM's.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdjQWuJeVqE [video]
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Bo...
[1]https://libertyjusticecenter.org/media/social-media-censorsh...
I prefer it this way. It's better for people to feel like criminals who whiteboard in backrooms how to manipulate public opinion by laundering prior restraint through putting pressure on the incomes of billionaires. Formalization of this process would just be permanent institutionalization, and the US government has shown throughout the 20c to now that a public board won't prevent abuses, abuses will just be routed around the board.
Or you mean the fascist warhawk that actually started several wars that ravaged the middle-east and passed the patriot act to give the government untold power over its citizens, both with bipartisan support I might add?
How can Trump be seen with such disdain in comparison when at worst he's just a more incompetent version of Obama with a social media addiction and republican slant. The NSA scandal was merely a decade ago, george w bush wasn't that far back either, how short are the memories. If anything his unconditional withdraw of all troops in afghanistan is the biggest anti-fascist action the last 3 presidents have done, although this one action certainly doesn't put him above being one given he wasn't even pulling the breaks on their actions beforehand.
Now if you want to talk about the many times that Democrats and Republicans all had a big lovefest so they could all vote together to invade a country, I'm with you on that, but it's a problem of both parties, as the voting record clearly demonstrates.
What's been happening the last decade or so is another thing entirely.
Funnily enough, so is yours.
What I highlighted pointed towards government becoming increasingly overbearing and ramping up surveillance on its citizens(NSA and patriot act), military extremism(patriot act again and the middle east), paternalism over other cultures(fear that the people would choose the "wrong"side in a country they invaded as an excuse to keep troops or to install proxy governments), and the list goes on.
You're at a point that covering true stories like the hunter biden laptop(that now journalists are verifying its authenticity) have made people like glenn greenwald persona non-grata in mainstream journalism circles, while having the intelligence agencies saying it is false. You have people that risked and are paying with their life to make information known to the public demonized because apparently leaking things about the candidate I like is bad, regardless of it being true. You have people asking for oversight for the contributions to Ukraine being labelled as russian assets(ie:enemy of our great state). You have intelligence agencies being labelled as some all knowing benevolent protectors of the populace not even a decade after the NSA leaks. The only thing that could be disguising it is because as it stands mostly the democrats seem to be on this publically, but make no mistake the moment push comes to shove the republicans will also take such position as they had taken before trump, and with thunderous applause from the "bipartisan" population if the current outlook is something to go by.
Fascism has been acting on the american society for a long time, Trump just coincidentally showed where the allegiances lied once someone that wasn't a career politician took over, luckily for them the man was an incompetent buffoon with his own laundry list of problems who got assimilated into the machine very fast, even if he would say otherwise.
If all of this for you isn't clear signs of fascism and instead trump, who mostly just inherited the actions of his predecessors is(making him just as much as the others I might add), we'll just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Fascism arises from a bad economy and a population who feel that they have no prospects or future. This tends to create a lot of angry young men hanging out in the streets, with nothing but time and cheap beer on their hands - a resource for sociopathic power seekers.
Whether these young men are Germans living under the absurd conditions of the Versailles treaty, lads from the trampled working class in Thatcher's England, or Americans working under late stage capitalism with No Child Left Behind Act schools, the fascist always works from the same playbook: Stoke the anger, and provide a convenient, nearly always racialized scapegoat outsider, then promise to do something about those outsiders with a never-ending reign of power as the actual goal.
One way to spot a fascist is, if they lose legitimate elections, they will attempt things like insurrections where they storm capital buildings. It's like a dark spot on the society's x-ray.
Those putsches don't always succeed, but as far as getting a movement of armed thugs to fight in the streets, the playbook works every time. The Republican party has been showing signs of a willingness to engage in Fascist behavior for decades, ever since they embraced the Southern Strategy, which even [Barry Goldwater](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/777519-mark-my-word-if-and-...) said would be the death of the party. And here we are, living with the GOP that he predicted would come as a result of their doing just that.
You bring up the NSA's surveillance, the Patriot Act, the various foreign wars that everyone except Bernie voted for with a rah rah rah - these all happened under GOP presidents, with a compliant, cooperative Democratic party that got behind the president, supposedly for the safety of the nation. This is the opposite of fascism.
I leave it to you whether you're gonna choose to notice the clear difference between the recent actions of the two parties, and I hope at the very least you can employ the right terminologies. Sometime in the early aughts I got into it with a Bush cheerleader who kept saying things like "You don't understand the philosophy of terrorism. Terrorists make women wear robes that cover their entire bodies and their societies are like, sexist!" That's what your use of the term "Fascism" reads like.