Big government and big business make it their business to work together to control and mold the population to as much of a degree as possible, which is why so many of our individual rights of liberty are under assault, and will continue to be under attack for the foreseeable future. The government-corporate State wants the public to believe that each issue only has two sides, to which they conveniently break it down for us into a liberal/conservative bias or into a right wing/left wing bias, and wish to present to the public the basic premise that one of these two sides must be the right side, so that whichever the selection might be, the State as a whole is satisfied.
Although the government-corporate State has massive control in regards to the dissemination of news to the general public through cable, radio, TV, print, and the most commonly used online social media websites, they do not have complete control. The fact of the matter is that no citizen lacks access to alternative viewpoints of all the news that is fit to print, or not fit to print, through all the common distribution systems within America. As much as the government-corporate State wants to control and to spin news to the credulous public, it ultimately ends up being something akin to whack-a-mole, and it simply can't be done.
While the consolidation along with the incredible power and influence of media outlets and distribution of such is most definitely cause for concern for lovers of liberty within America, viewpoints of virtually any and all possible flavors, are readily accessible to those that perform even a rudimentary search for it. The government-corporate State wants to win the minds of all Americans and to marginalize as much as possible those that fall outside their clearly defined lines, but it can't be done, mainly because each American has a right, even a duty, to think, and thinking is the basis of free will which is anathema to State control.
A free press is not something to be taken for granted, as there are many totalitarian countries that make it their policy to control the information that is provided to their populace as much as possible, and in conjunction with that control, to penalize those that have the audacity to challenge those in authority. A country that has control of the press, is a dangerous place, because it censors the press, which therefore means it censors the mind, and thereby creates two worlds, one that the State believes exists and it owns, and a shadow world of an alternate reality, to which denizens of such, recognize that just one wrong step, can cost them everything.
American citizens desperately want to believe that the government-corporate State treats them fairly, but time and time again, they see that this is not possibly true. Further to this point, the government-corporate State wants to keep as H.L. Mencken states: "…the populace alarmed…" to which every little thing is a crisis that can only be resolved if the government-corporate State gets a little more power, a little more control, just for a little while, till this one little thing, gets resolved, because they, the government-corporate State really cares about you and they will protect you.
The thing is though that mass hypnosis of an entire nation can only work, if everyone drinks of the same Kool-Aid, even 90% of the populace is not enough, even 95% is still not enough, for try as they might the government-corporate State can't get to 100%, fundamentally because freedom of the press still breathes strongly within our shores, let it ever be so.