Most people are not super well-informed about any time, place, or culture they're not a part of, and that's as true today as it ever was. So why don't they just say that in the disclaimer? Tell people something meaningful about what they're seeing. Explain the context, don't just be like "This is horrible and we're above it! But, umm, since you seem to like it, still totally pay us for it." Disney is a lazy, vulture-like company, and manages to add "tone deaf" whenever it tries to look enlightened.

So, just to be clear, your understanding of a nation of 300 million people comes entirely from a selective sampling of fictional entertainment put out by a handful of media companies and advertising firms. Never mind that you're overwhelmingly wrong even about that: Corporate CEOs are regularly depicted as being every bit as crazy as they actually are. It seems you're overgeneralizing the part of the media support by ad revenue, which is self-aggrandizing and propagandistic because funnily enough, businesses that advertise care about their image. But the part based solely on direct subscription has no problem demonizing its owners: People are entertained by a good pillory.

I'm 24 years old and I say music today is indeed horrifyingly, cataclysmically, apocalyptically craptacular. I've been saying that since I was a teenager, when post-Nirvana glory faded from view, hip hop took over the charts, and emo took over what passes for rock. Every time I hear Fall Out Boy or anything like them, I feel like I just stepped in something. Every time I hear the mind-numbing mass-produced beats and lyrics of hip hop, I want to scream out "Why?! Why?!" I want to grab the nearest idiot listening to rap, shake them, and demand to know why they're listening to it; and why they're making me listen to it by playing it out loud in their car with the windows open. Virtually all good music made in the past decade has come either from continuing '90s bands, or new bands created from the fusion of earlier artists (e.g., Audioslave). Mine is truly an aesthetically dead generation--they can never and will never create music with the sense of freedom, joy, and magic embodied in the best of previous decades. They're not "whippersnappers," they're hardwired post-human automatons who listen to "music-flavored product" for anesthesia.