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I'm sure the public would be perfectly fine believing that nothing untoward is happening if the media was on the side of the ruling administration and either not talking about it or dutifully framing it and reminding normies that these are people who broke the law and are getting their comeuppance (however fitting that is to the facts).
That's unlikely to happen under a Republican administration for political reasons, but the idea that it's impossible to convince your run of the mill American to be indifferent to the fate of people with interests that conflict with theirs is farcical. Wars were begun and ended on much flimsier pretenses.
The question is whether you'd call that media manipulation authoritarianism or not. I think any serious analysis is past such qualifiers. Effecting unpopular causes with popular consequences is like the entire purpose of government. And people really want to be lied to about these things.
They want to think of themselves as empathetic whilst they launder the violence necessary to maintain society to the State. So the banality of evil has to happen, but off camera.
Kind of tangential, but whenever I hear people complaining that the media is reporting unfairly on Trump (which, to be fair, you are not saying), I want to play a very sad song for that guy on the world's tiniest violin. Trump made his first baby steps into politics by condemning the Central Park Five, and not surprising to anyone with the benefit of hindsight, he was full of shit when he did so. Decades later, he elected the fringe conspiracy theory of birtherism to make a foray into politics in earnest, followed notably by the denial of the 2020 election result. Even his White House press releases look like the ramblings of someone who has long lost contact with anything resembling objective truth. So if his political demise comes at a totally fabricated yellow press story of him fucking a male underage porcupine, I would call that poetic justice.
Now, I am a lot more sympathetic to both deontological and consequentialist arguments against twisting the truth to foil him. The deontological argument is basically that by adopting a Trumpian nihilist irreverence for what is true, the press is basically throwing overboard the most important quality which separated them from him. (Or at least part of it -- see SA on Bounded Distrust.) The consequentialist argument is that you can not out-bullshit the master bullshitter, and that the way to prevail against him is not to get dragged down to his level. (Not that I would call the spinning the MSM did on this story Trump level dishonesty, sure, they did spin it and selectively reported the facts to suit their agenda, but if this was instead a WH press release I would be fully prepared to later learn that Honduras is not a country and people do not have mothers because humans multiply through fission.)
And sure, from some cosmic perspective, Trump probably does not deserve to have lies told about him, in the same way that Billy the fucking Kid did not deserve to have his life snuffed out by a piece of lead.
Live by the media controversy, die by the media controversy?
I'm sure the man himself actually loves it. You never see him smirk as much as when he can call some journo "fake news". I find that whilst the most ridiculous lies are told about the man and he constantly complains about it, the way he frames the complaints tells another story. Trump is constantly doing "a little trolling (it's called [...] a little trolling)".
The far more legitimate complaint here is that the MSM should be, on their own terms, above falling for it. And yet since 2016 they've gleefully shoveled their credibility into a fire trying to claim the "Trump bump" to anchor their dying viewerships.
Not that I am making the complaint, I'm now securely convinced that journalists have always been dishonorable sellswords and should be treated as such. But that's what I imagine the frustration from people sentimental about the Cronkite era looks like.
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