I think the time for worry has past. We should have been worried in 2001 and 2003 when the various wars and security state was set up. Now it's a fact of life if you cannot escape it. This is not to say there will not be certain events as a mile marker like this one, but now it is just simply reality, life under martial law. In most countries the martial law period lasts about 20 years, but can go on to almost 40-50, like it did in Taiwan and Myanmar. Of course martial law is rarely used for the term, but martial law is martial law. In USA in some ways we had a soft martial law, in some ways not. But either way, it's not business as usual. But it is. It becomes the new normal, various things happening. This is not to say things before martial law are always a golden time of freedom and opportunity, but I'm just saying after martial law, there's a distinct shift towards things being bad, and it can take a long time for a country to recover from it, if it ever really does at all.

Aside from that not directly connected to CNN, and just a quip, regarding the mainstream media, there's the really obvious problem of age divide. I'm in my mid 20s. Admittedly I'm not a hugely social person and IRL I'm friends with a lot of less mainstream people overall. But everyone I know within plus or minus 10 years of my age has about fairly little trust for the mainstream media, and gets most of their news online, and doesn't watch TV in as significant amounts as their parents. However, these people's parents, it's basically the opposite situation, just glued to the TV all day, now retired or disabled usually. They trust the TV as being basically a god, and you can give well educated people scientific articles about something, and they'll still repeat "but on TV they said Prozac was great for you...." These people are very very hard to deprogram. But these people, and not young people, vote the most (dunno how much this matters, but maybe it does, but probably not...) pay the most taxes, make the most money, or have pensions, and also use the most government services. They're the political establishment, and really, most businesses' walking ATMs compared to millennials. And for the very few "turned on" boomer generation people, I find many unfortunately have a guru worshipping mentality, of not being able to formulate real ideas of their own or thinking independently. Instead, listen to Alex Jones, listen to Sean Hannity, listen to the guy who says the Earth is flat on youtube, and instead of becoming a real conscious person, they treat these people as they did Dan Rather.

So as it is now, there's basically two different narratives for both groups of people, split along age range and how they were programmed, or deprogrammed, or programmed again, from youth. We've been, fortunately or unfortunately, "programmed" by the internet, and not TV. And for CNN's sake, various world governments are applying supercomputers, and billions, if not trillions of dollars, to figure out how to adequately use the internet to further their own ends and make people believe what they want them to or shut up people who they want them to. But, they're having an uphill battle with it for certain. I don't see how CNN is going to do it when they're basically a two bit county town crier newspaper by comparison. CNN and mainstream news at this point might as well be the crazy man with a copy machine telling people the world will end (which oddly enough, is actually the bulk of mainstream news now, it harbors actually more fear than most "conspiracy" news now...) by the street corner with a sign.