I remember watching a 60 Minutes episode from the mid-2000s about government corruption and embezzlement of oil wealth by the ruling family of Equatorial Guinea, and how American oil companies facilitated this corruption. They interviewed a representative of an American oil industry group and confronted him about whether it was ethical to keep doing business with a dictator knowing that the billions in oil money was going straight into the pocket of a corrupt autocrat and his family to fund lavish spending sprees in Paris and mansions in America while the people of Equatorial Guinea starved in some of the poorest and worst living standards in the world. Of course, the industry rep claimed that it was ethical, and the reporters got kicked out of Equatorial Guinea and harassed by local security forces.

But that's the kind of fearless reporting that just doesn't get done any more. It's cheaper to just have people in the newsroom write clickbait articles about what local political figures are yapping about on Bluesky than to send people to create that sort of high-quality journalism. And there's no chance that any oil industry representative would ever agree to that sort of interview now. At most, they would just have their PR division write a two-paragraph statement.

It goes back even further. Look at how much the media worked to cover up FDR's polio.