The TSA probably views its own mission as largely a propaganda mission. It's just creepy when we realize that it is trying to silence public debate.
The biggest oddity to me is that it's been over 10 years and this debate hasn't actually happened in the mainstream media.
I think one aspect of most orgs that have entrenched power is that they are always very deferent toward government. NPR is a great example... there is lots of coverage of various wall street schemes, mention of greed as a problem in the private sector, etc., but the underlying message in most of the stories is that government is beyond reproach.
The change happened earlier than 2008. It happened when funding was getting dismantled in Congress and subsequently a conservative ombudsman was appointed along with a guy to run operations that used to run Radio Free Europe. After that, it was National Petroleum Radio.
Republicans largely support the things that we're objecting to here, along with Obama.
Not sure that data is available, but I was listening to NPR news during that time. I thought they did decent job of highlighting the poor behavior of our government. Then things changed (not government behavior, which is the same if not worse).
At the pinnacle of the credit crisis they started hating on the financial services sector. As if they had any idea of what credit derivative were. The "experts" they had on air seemed to have a textbook definition which would then be simplified by saying "It's basically gambling". Uhg.
At some point I realized that most of their "experts" (in all their coverage) were either working for the government, the Federal Reserve, or had financial ties to the government (grant recipients, lobbyist, etc...). I stopped listening around 2010 after I found myself yelling at the radio too often. Maybe things have changed.
The biggest oddity to me is that it's been over 10 years and this debate hasn't actually happened in the mainstream media.
I think one aspect of most orgs that have entrenched power is that they are always very deferent toward government. NPR is a great example... there is lots of coverage of various wall street schemes, mention of greed as a problem in the private sector, etc., but the underlying message in most of the stories is that government is beyond reproach.