There is no evidence that the media was part of the conspiracy, they just parroted the talking points and a few media outlets did heavily question the rationale.. the fact is both wars were hugely popular when they started so few listened.

This is not even close to a comparable situation to the social medial platforms, these platforms and democratized and weaponized mis-information. But it not just them, the ad-funded internet creates perverse incentives for views not truth, FB et al don’t care about truth they care about engagement, they know emotional touch points particularly angry drive engagement so their feeds optimize for that.

Our fractured society is just an emergent behavior from several complex systems with poor incentives, as such we need to find out a way to realign the incentives