Thank you for the thoughtful comments.

The examples you cite of the U.S. government forcibly repressing the voices of left-wing Americans are from the Cold War. That’s been over for almost three decades, and the specific examples you gave are decades older than that. I have a hard time seeing that as evidence for what’s going on today.

That’s especially true in the internet era. Take Camp as an example. No mainstream publication or television network will give him a platform. But he can blog, tweet, post on Facebook, upload videos to YouTube, etc. Even without getting a show on RT, he has much greater opportunity to disseminate his views than people in the pre-internet era.

Repression would be the government arresting him for what he says. Or at least forcibly deleting his internet posts. Repression is not media organizations declining to feature his work.

Additionally, you note some examples of the 21st century media making mistakes. I agree. They make mistakes. And it’s smart to approach all reports with the assumption that the media is made up of humans, subject to human failings — such as implicit bias, confirmation bias, etc. — and therefore sometimes makes mistakes.

My disagreement is with the alternative assumption that the media is usually wrong, and that those errors are due to a deliberate (or at least subconscious) effort to manipulate the public into supporting the current establishment.