Fundamentally the problem is that the US is just too rich. That creates incentives, like:
A strong incentive to use media to control the abundance of resources for personal benefit
Valuable advertising, leading to corporate propaganda that exploits our emotions, and hyperemotional, fluffy news coverage designed to grab our attention rather than inform
A near-monopoly on extremely wealthy people, which leads those people to spend directly on promoting pro-stratification candidates
This creates a catch-22. To fix the media and government, we need to spread out wealth to dilute financial power. But to do that would require policy changes that require fixing the media and government.
Fundamentally the problem is that the US is just too rich. That creates incentives, like:
This creates a catch-22. To fix the media and government, we need to spread out wealth to dilute financial power. But to do that would require policy changes that require fixing the media and government.