for an example of the hermetic seamlessless of the media system I think about recent flaps over shock jocks and hate-talk radio, wingnut TV etc... there's a fuss about some on-air wannabe Goebbels who goes a bit "too far" with his racist or misogynist drivel, and he gets allegedly fired, usually just shuffled off to some subsidiary network of the same corporation;  and then the "first amendment liberals" come out of the woodwork invoking every case of State censorship ever recorded and yapping about the necessity of protecting our precious freedoms of speech from the heavy hand of the State...

like they don't understand that the same 4 companies who own all their media -- including the shock jocks and the hate-talk radio stations -- are the same companies that own the bomb factories and whose revolving doors staff the national policy agencies and whose slush funds buy politicians right, right, and centre...  like they don't understand that the shock jocks are the State, the ideological shock troops of the State... that the State is the corporate elite... the racism and gaybashing and misogynist drek on the airwaves are the unofficial component of the recruitment campaign to send them or their kids overseas to Prove Their Manhood (who wants to be a faggy peacenik) and kill brown people whom they've been trained to despise and contemn by listening to hate-talk radio...  like the Boss doesn't love getting the underemployed, insecure, angry electorate/workers to hate their neighbour or the immigrant down the street or Uppity Wimmin or Unnatural Queers or Inferior Darkskinned Subhumans and blame them for all the unemployment and crumbling infrastructure and dearth of social services and police crackdowns... rather than pointing the finger upwards, at the Old (white) Boys Club that runs the show and shovels our tax dollars into their private pockets.

the Bosses have really got it figured out -- they can pump their propaganda out on the public air waves 24x7, for profit, and get the listeners to agitate angrily and vociferously for their right to be spoonfed state/corporate PR and brain detergent.  it's beyond anything Terry Pratchett could satirise.  it's just a win-win-win situation -- for the Bosses.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...