See here:

The reason we don’t have effective protections for climate change (or functional gun control, or universal health care, or cheap broadband) is because the U.S. Congress is often too corrupt to function. Monied interests have polluted state and federal legislatures to the point they no longer serve the public interest.

This isn’t some errant opinion, it’s a documentable, provable fact. Yet you’ll notice that for the New York Times, the idea that the structural and ethical integrity of the U.S. government has been wholly compromised by the extraction class simply plays absolutely no useful contextual role in the story.

Not only does the Times not acknowledge corporate corruption (in a story ostensibly about how corporate power run amok will avoidably kill untold millions of people), they attribute the real cause of the problem to ambiguous “partisan polarization.” It’s framed as a problem related to team sports.

We’re told that we don’t have functional health care, cheap fiber broadband, or functional gun control – not because the companies with a stranglehold over these sectors have lobotomized government norms and ethics – but because of some sort of intangible, inherent, and largely mysterious failure of human collaboration.

This is something you’ll see often. It’s a rhetorical trick to deflect attention away from the fact that the extraction class and consolidated corporate power (who not coincidentally own the lion’s share of modern media) have demolished the structural support pillars holding up a functional democracy.

The tl;dr? It’s fucking billionaires.