LS, I have been patiently awaiting your effort on the "History of the Media". It was my understanding from earlier comments it was to be a work to determine when, how and why the major media went left. The mechanisms that enabled the leftist media to effectively be the last man standing is of no small consequence IMHO. I don't believe it's an overstatement to claim they almost singlehandedly moved the country to the left and away from our founding principles and precepts. From the sound of it, you've encountered a large ball of string; a furball even.
Would it be a stretch to suggest the forces that were and are at work moving major media and many of our elected officials, primarily in DC, towards collectivism are one and the same? If these forces exist, and I believe they do, who and what are they? Properly practiced, investigative journalism would be a hoot, eh?
I’m not going that far. What I’m trying to convey is that sometimes in academic research, the “obvious” answer isn’t always supported by evidence, or sometimes the evidence doesn’t prove what you hoped it might. When that happens, you just have to develop a new hypothesis. But to be able to test something, as you put it, it can’t be too big a ball of string. That’s the limits of scholarship. It’s one of the reasons that conclusively showing what “caused” the Great Depression-—when you’re dealing with international gold flows, different nations diddling with tariffs and money supplies for their own ends, and just plain old nuts dictators-—is harder than one might think. The same is true with this. We developed what I thought was a pretty foolproof test with a TON of data, but it pretty much confirmed the obvious (the media moved left) without ever providing us sufficient details on the WHY.