In 2000, he didn't.
Were you even alive in 1970? I think you weren't, and you don't understand the absolute information dominance ABC/NBC/CBS had, along with leftist newspapers.
In 2021 they got away with it.
They lied about Covids mortality rate. Given as 20% initially, turns out to be .2%, or 1/100th what was claimed.
They lied about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.
They lied about the origin of the virus, Wuhan.
They lied about gain of function testing and said we don’t engage in that.
They lied about the effectiveness of masks and social distancing, pretending that a 50 nm virus can be filtered out by a mask that can’t filter anything smaller than 200 - 500 nm.
They pushed for vaccine mandates and sold that as some great idea despite violating people’s basic rights and their privacy, not giving no concern to what they re doing to people.
Yeah sure, things are really different today.
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You once had literally thousands of local newspapers (all the way through the early 80s), and the Internet was free in the early 90s. But today, in the age of government censorship, far greater government secrecy (government transparency rolled back post 2001), and collusion with the media and social media on certain topics, with social media in the hands of two or three people where one person alone controls over 50% of what people see and hear, and the MSM is really just 6 major media conglomerates that control ~90% of what people see or hear on TV, you no longer have a free media.
The era of major media all merging began in the mid 80s: https://teachdemocracy.org/online-lesson/media-mergers-and-the-public-interest/#:~:text=In%20the%201980s%2C%20President%20Ronald,a%20wave%20of%20media%20mergers.
What you have in the US is 200+ channels on TV but really just a few people that have the reigns in their hands, and when they decide to take a certain direction on an issue or during the elections, you’ll see near all the media follow the lead.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg in reality is motivated by the threat of government applying the Sherman Act against him and the Trump administration in their first term really did go down that road full force. (((ALL))) of today’s Meta went vehemently and overwhelmingly anti-Trump in the Biden-Trump elections and guess where the majority of Americans get their “news” from today? Social Media.