As for your statement that the MSM "are experts and even geniuses of a sort when it comes to manipulating the public," I can only buy that to a certain extent. Apparently, the American people are getting turned off increasingly by the MSM, as demonstrated by the plummeting network and lefty cable TV news ratings and waning circulations of the likes of the New York Slimes and the WaPo. You can get a sense of schadenfreude when you look at the Slimes' stock price chart.
Yeh. They’ve been caught at it so often, they don’t dare go out on a limb too far anymore. Which is why, as you say, they’d have to be desperate to do that. They may be geniuses at mass deception, but mass deception has its laws of physics, too, just like any other field, and geniuses are powerless against those laws of physics. They can find loopholes in them, which is what geniuses do that amazes people so, but they can’t outright defy them.
I’ll reserve my schadenfreude for when the New York Slimes goes into receivership, when I’ll celebrate by wiping my ass on the masthead of the edition where they finally confirm the reports of their insolvency.