The same way we disambiguate what's right versus what's commercially expedient across the whole gradient of (soulless, dodgy, unethical, malpractice, fraudulent). It does not matter that people want to hear garbage that reaffirms their lazy beliefs - if you are in a position of power and take the easy/lucrative road of base affirmation, rather than the harder route of actually leading people somewhere productive, you are a bad person and you should feel bad. And people that know better should condemn you for that, rather than tacitly accepting your sold out self interest.

Also if I'm reading your comment correctly, characterizing potential leadership as "cognitively-dissonant news" is a bit weird, especially with "cognitive dissonance" commonly referring to the rejection of criticism in the larger run up to the war on Iraq. With both points it feels like you're nominally agreeing, but still trying to push this framework that the news media and other leadership is inherently blameless.

I don't think either the federal government or the media are blameless (that's a federal government that authorized torture; they're obviously not blameless). But I also think we like to pretend the American public got duped or are blameless when it's (a) Americans who elect the government and (b) Americans who buy the newspapers (especially in that era, when online advertising hadn't yet eaten the printed word). There's a certain minimum "citizen's responsibility" that nobody gets away with just dodging in a country where they're obligated to choose their leadership and hold their own press accountable.

> Also if I'm reading your comment correctly, characterizing potential leadership as "cognitively-dissonant news" is a bit weird

Because Americans elect their leadership, they have the advantage that many (ideally, most) voted for them and so are inclined to follow them. But they also have the disadvantage that Presidents are not thought of as infallible rulers with any kind of mandate from heaven, so when things get tough their position is a lot more fragile than many would assume. You can easily see this play out in how an untrusted executive failed to handle a pandemic recently; it didn't matter whether they were right or wrong, much of America had that President and his administration pegged as "nominally and legally in charge, but too stupid to follow" and discarded federal guidance the minute it inconvenienced them unless force of law (often and mostly: state law) prevented them from doing so.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, the cognitively-dissonant news was media suggesting Saddam Hussein's administration was not involved in global terror. True or false, it didn't fly because Americans wanted someone to blame that they were confident they could kill (as opposed to the guy who'd successfully evaded capture in Afghanistan) and Hussein was a very easy-to-believe target because he was already one generation's default bad-guy.

(But to be clear: the executive in charge during 9/11 did orchestrate a hell of a lie to get the US into another war in Iraq; that scenario is well-documented and involved multiple overt fabrications of information. I may assert that a more skeptical public that wasn't having a panic may not have bought those lies, but that's not intended to downplay the responsibility of the liars).

I think the takeaway from this sub-thread is "Scared Americans and power-hungry leadership make for a bad combination." But the larger point I wanted to emphasize is that the consequences of those changes to American law aren't as reversible as just declaring "Well those guys were monsters;" bits like the no-fly list are sticky even if the people who implemented them were bad-faith actors.