It's only two sentences, so I assumed neither of them were fluff...I interpreted "the legacy media" being mentioned adjacent to your personifying the US as someone carrying out foreign policy as implying they are closely related.

If you didn't mean it that way, ok, but I think it's a common view and common to express it like this.

If the media is an arm of the establishment, the rulers of the country, with a singular purpose of supporting it regardless of policy changes, that is what I'd call a totalitarian monolith.

Now if you don't view things that way, fine, but it seems like maybe half of the politically aware US public is more or less on board with that worldview, except that they identify the "monolith" with the left.

Literally every day recently, I hear, on the radio that is always playing in a convenience store I go to, an ad for a famous person's new show on Newsmax, that is somehow rebelling against (I forget the exact phrase) major media outlets. I guess the phrase "mainstream media" is tired, but the concept seems to remain.

The baseline here is the assumption that there is no free press, that there is no diversity of opinion, and I see that sort of claim made everywhere, every day. By, you know, the brave dissenters.

I wonder if it's so ubiquitous that you have stopped seeing it as a background?