Hmm. Some descriptions work better as summaries of black-box behavior, than as insight into white-box causation and potential for intervention. I wonder if "corrupt and ineffective corporate media" is an instance of such.

For illustration. Science education is remarkably ineffective, K-14, and worldwide. A rule of thumb that "people don't care whether science education actually works", will rarely steer you wrong. But it is an almost useless description of the underlying tangle of incentives and capabilities and visibilities and costs, which cause that surface behavior.

Take a professor teaching cell biology, who isn't disinterested in teaching deep understanding, but who, given severe time constraints, isn't going to disservice their students by trading against a specific superficial understanding that the high-stakes med school MCAT exam tests for. So yes, "don't care", sort of. But change the MCAT, and suddenly...

So one can have a observationally good description, one that's fine for spectators, but which isn't illuminating or helpful interventionally.

Or take the earlier copyright example. During the fight over SOPA, Hollywood executives publicly and angrily complained about congressmen not staying bought. A surface reading of that isn't a bad description of everyone's behavior. But my understanding is, they were basically saying "we talk among ourselves all the time; and we all agree; only a few weird and confused others disagree; and we're now startled and dismayed to find some politicians disagreeing; and can only imagine that this results from them being bought, or lied to, likely by the tech industry; we payed good money to elect what we thought were good people - why should we pay for the reelection of the corrupt and the gullible?". Will more insight into mechanism help you? Maybe not.

But while incentives matter, it's the actual incentives that matter. What if US copyright extensions were fought not with "Constitutional intent" and "public interest", so basically "we want you to give up a few billion dollars a year in Pooh et al merchandising fees", but fought instead with "here's a change in trademark law, or a copyright-excepting guardianship of a national treasure, which will preserve your big revenue streams in perpetuity". Addressing actual incentives, rather than narratives.