Encountered a YouTube segment which refers to Carl Sagan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGanLUnjoPI - astronomer and physicist, who died about 25 years ago.  Shortly before his death he forecast a potential future for the USA.  One striking point to which Sagan eluded is the importance of information sources in which one can have confidence and which are accountable, public broadcasters, as you might see in watching the YouTube segment or reading the following.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time … when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.  The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance" - Carl Sagan (1995).