i was issued a work laptop where i dont have admin rights, so i just leave it vanilla and don't really do any personal browsing with it. every once in a while, a widget will inform me of breaking news. sometimes its a national weather service announcement for the area, sometimes it's something that can be considered national news, and frequently the other "breaking news" headlines are clickbait headlines like these about deals and member changes at costco.
this should be the hilarious evidence damning privately-owned capitalist news media, but the encroachment of advertising into every fragment of perceived reality is too normalized. might as well be the wind and the rain. everybody hates ads, "but they gotta make money, so what can be done?" if brought up, the idea of state-owned, democratically managed is scoffed at, because "obviously" it would be riddled with state propaganda instead of ads. as though our privately-owned, capitalist news media isn't running constant interference for the state's unpopular, unflinching support for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. like god almighty, if i could just have state propaganda instead of both state propaganda and advertising, that would be a huge win for my sanity.