An outside perspective helps - it is very hard to have the cognizance and understanding to see through subtle propaganda like this when it has been ‘normal’ your entire life.

Growing up abroad I almost exclusively saw print and TV media coverage of murder, fraud, rape, etc trials whilst almost never seeing a real image of the accused - just pastel courtroom sketches and videos of vans like that swerving into prison yards flanked by journalists throwing their cameras up at the tinted windows, hoping their photo flash can punch through and get a blurry headshot.

Conversely in the US where a lazy/complicit media will routinely engage in access journalism in a quid pro quo with the state/wealthy/famous, where they are fed information directly from the source they are ostensibly ‘investigating’ who will demand to remain anonymous, whilst also feeding the press select information and context that build a narrative. “Journalist” gets a story for their deadline with minimal effort and can repeatedly go back to that source in the future as long as they don’t challenge the state/PR narrative. Rinse and repeat, collect paycheck and vie for that Pulitzer headpat.

Why do you think we keep having these ‘open secret’ and #MeToo falls from grace despite decades of predatory behavior? Real journalists get careers cancelled, death threats, or assassinated in a carbombing for exposing the Panama, Paradise, & Pandora Papers, we have far too much lazy reposting masquerading as actual journalism.

same