[FilterJoe]

Chomksy's book, Manufacturing Consent, goes a long way to explaining how U.S. mainstream politics works in conjunction with the media, even though it was written over 2 decades ago.

20 word summary:

Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.

So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.

If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?