Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch of books about the free press's coverage of geopolitical issues and one of his biggest points of emphasis was how the whole spectrum of permissible debate was basically indistinguishable. That's why I used Israel as one example.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a single newspaper article in the run-up to 2000 that was willing to simply say plainly that Al Gore was objectively right about climate change and what a fucking emergency it was, for example. It was always represented as a "debate" and his absolutely voice-in-the-wilderness diagnosis was a "viewpoint." He had to make a whole movie of his own to be able to speak plainly about what was going on, because literally no one in the news was explaining what needed to be explained about it. And that was all after counterculture news started to get a little bit of early traction on the internet and puncture the monopoly a little bit.
It is almost impossible for people who grew up post-internet to grasp how constrained the news in the pre-internet era was. It sounds like we're making it up, like of course it couldn't have been like that.

