Yeah, no. The Overton window is so incredibly small in America that normal, run of the mill political positions - either left or right - in the rest of the world are deemed extremist and radical in America.
Things have been far more polarised since the rise of social media. You can blame fox news and cnn or whatever all you want, but given how far the US is from the days of Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy etc I don't see how you can simply blame "corporate media".
Corporate media used to have regulations on how much local media any single company could own. I think the consolidation of media ownership made it easier to have a single corporate vision.
Both are true. The end of the Fairness Doctrine normalised the psychotic distortions and lies pumped out by Fox. But the same machine that uses Fox also runs bot farms, astroturfing operations, and curated social media algorithms to normalise even more extreme RW POVs.
The problem is not the people taking advantage of a vulnerability, but the vulnerability itself. That such a significant portion of the US population is so gullible and so ready to believe misinformation that aligns with their desires is the real issue.
The problem is not media, at least not primarily. The problem is an ancient and not-democratic first past the post system, preventing emergence of any alternative, good or bad.
I agree with your sentiment, but Canada uses FPTP and as much as I would love to move to a proportional system, our politics is significantly less limiting than yours. Both of your major parties, and all of your corporate media are so captured by billionaires you don't even know how bad things are in your country without an external frame of reference.
Really? Is your speech freer than mine in Canada? Are your human Rights protected better than mine? I wonder what the rioters in LA would have to say about that?
The US is notably "freer" for some types of speech. Quite a few countries ban Nazi flags, hate speech, etc. to some extent. The EU bans direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. The UK banned political parties from advertising on TV in 1955.
In my opinion, doing so to some extent is important to preserve the rights of other parts of society, but that's not a universally held opinion by any means.
Either they're doing medicine, or they're building medical equipment.
The former case is unlikely, since, unlike writing software (but like many forms of actual engineering), there are actually formally defined standards for what you have to know before you're allowed to practice medicine. If they are doing medicine, then the word "engineer" is being abused. Medicine is not engineering. Programming isn't engineering either. Programming isn't even much like engineering.
In the latter case, they are of course acting as engineers and the name makes sense. It's not clear what the software counterpart to, say, an artificial heart would be, though, so software engineers in that sense can't exist. I suppose there are software counterparts to medical tools, like stethoscopes and X-ray machines. We usually call the people who design them "electrical engineers" or "computer engineers".
Oh, and other things I might have considered for the analogy were things like "If a philosopher writes software, does that make it software philosophy?" I picked medicine as a random vaguely technically credential.
Your Corporate media is the problem.