I don't claim the popular media gives a very balanced or nuanced view of the world, but consider that their target audience is laughably ignorant of history, geography, and geo-politics. It's like getting your knowledge of technical issues from USA Today or feature pieces on TV news. If you are interested in the issue, you have other sources of information and have very little interest in what "the man on the street" thinks. If you're not, you pick up enough to be able to participate in discussions and have strong opinions <g> but don't have to think about it a lot.

>>>I was not aware that dicatators in Indonesia and S. Korea committed atrocities against their own people under the watchful eye of the US govt and nothing was done because the dictator was considered such an important cog in the fight against communism.
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>>But that is not because it was "covered up" Everyone who cared about it knew about it. Indifference is not the same as being the victim of a conspiracy to suppress knowledge.
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>OTOH, it's about making lists and repeating. If you hear about Tienanmen hundreds of times over the decades, and you hear about Indonesian and South Korean stuff less than once a year, the latter evaporate from collective memory, while the former gets welded to it.