"To simply blame "Corporate Media" is to oversimplify. Corporations are just collections of individuals and they don't operate in a vacuum."

Well, yes and no. Yet for all the complexities raised regarding the structure of the U.S. national media (remembering that foreign newspapers & magazines also have a corporate structure yet still represent the parties and political movements which formed them, such as labor party papers), and all the complexities of the audience.

But by no stretch of the imagination are corporations simply "collections of individuals", and no corporation or corporate historian would ever, ever see it that way. Corporations, like states, have a continuous and analyzable history based in the same structural factors, whether that history be simple or complex, factors which are used every day by the most sober, boring, and non-conspiratorial historians and social scientists.

To state that corporations are merely collections of individuals is to miss out on why the invention of corporations and their legal protection by governments led to the most powerful economic institutions in the Earth's history. There have been 'collections of individuals' throughout history, but there have only been corporations for either several hundred years or a bit over a century, depending on your definition.

...still, I keep looking for a better explanation of why these huge, major news media collapses that we keep pointing out somehow never seem to fall in the direction of favoring dovishness, or policies supporting the poor or workers, or in opposition to a proposed hawkish foreign policies.

There is a choice in explanations. Explaining that things are complex is not a substitute for noting that all the major errors and collapses fall in the same direction.

Even your most sober-minded scientists start paying attention when results trend in predictable directions despite all the variables they thought would be the determining factors.

"The point I was trying to make is that corporations, by their very nature, are going to go where the money is. If there's money to be made pointing out how corrupt the administration is and how the war was started with a pack of lies, then someone will step in to fill the void. Oh wait a minute, did I say that Viacom owns the Comedy Channel?"

Again, I find it remarkable that there is such a remarkable degree of consistency in how the US' primarily corporate news media fall so evenly on the side of power and the hawks whenever hawkish foreign policies are proposed, and seem to only come out with hard skepticism & genuine criticism once those policies have gone bad.

Surely, then, at some time, at some point, there should have been some "money" in going against the hawkish policies.

But perhaps it's the case that some of the people who invest in, run, and otherwise control corporations are just as smart as you and I. They are perhaps just as perceptive as people like Ralph Reed, or Karl Rove, or we liberal bloggers, who are able to simultaneously look at issues strategically for short and long term consequences.

It would be a truly bizarre occurrence in human history if the U.S. alone would have developed a culture with enormous amounts of concentrated economic and governmental power, yet somehow no subtle infrastructure by which the wealthiest and most powerful are able to perceive and when possible influence events to their interests. Either we dismiss such a normal, natural societal occurrence as 'conspiracy theory' or some other ideologically-flavored term, or we somehow carry on the tradition of magical American exceptionalism, in which the kinds of things we know to have shaped history for every other society just hasn't happened here.

It would be a strange and bizarre thing, then, if by chance the most concentrated media and news media system on the planet developed without any way of hedging its bets so that in the long term, the content flowing out of that system failed to promote both the short and long-term interests of that system, which is also to say the recipients of the benefits of that system.

But I don't want to get into that, because there are certainly plenty of people, both those who like and those who don't like the power of corporations, who have studied and analyzed the subtle workings of such power in the USA.

We can't be afraid of seeing systematic answers when they're staring us in the face.

We can go on and on about complexity, but then once again are we just going to stand around and act all shocked and surprised again when as a whole the news media once again collapse, fall, fail to do its job at the next giant initiation of a hawkish foreign policy?

Are we going to wonder in a confused fashion why it is that the overall coverage we see undermines apparently objective facts and analyses regarding any domestic policies which seem both populist and popular?

And "where the money is" is not just where consumers put the money -- it's where investors, partner corporations, and advertisers put the money, which is a lot more influential, due to its tight control than consumer's money. Not to mention the social outlook and calculated self-interest by the most influential executives and individual or corporate investors in a news corporation.

The money which comes from subscribing to a newspaper is, influentially-speaking, a hill of beans to a newspaper, because all it does is serve to prove to advertisers & backers that X number of eyes are possibly looking at the paper or web page. A million of us might begin to just be noticed versus the influence of one Archer Daniels Midlands.

Again, though, even if no one is even slightly interested in these comments on how corporations may or may not work in the USA, we are still left to explain why the giant errors and failures and collapses which concern us in the major news media trend in such a predictable fashion.