They've become so accustomed to just manufacturing whatever public sentiment that they want that they don't realize that there are limits to the magic of alchemy, and with hundreds of millions of people around the world, the spell is already broken.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2021/01/11/stop-disputing-bidens-election-win-or-be-terminated-radio-chain-tells-conservative-talk-show-hosts/?sh=4f1c7e097253

This is no small point here, by the way. They literally believe they can manufacture, by engineering the discourses, whatever public sentiment and mood they want. They think they can induce national calm by censoring people and tailoring what people hear and say.

It's absolutely crucial to understanding what's happening now to understand the idea of "discourse engineering," where they believe they can do social engineering by changing what people talk about and, quite clearly, achieve virtually any end with it.

The postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard called this "legitimation by paralogy," by the way, and criticized it pretty effectively (given that he was PoMo and therefore a bit cuckoo and off-the-mark). On that point, but not all related points, he was right.

"Legitimation by paralogy" roughly means "manufacturing 'truth(iness)' through (forcing) consensus," or, in simpler language, creating social enforcement of lies that must be believed. Lyotard rightly recognized that this is a disaster (he wrongly believed everything is that).

In my recent essay on psychopathy and the origins of totalitarianism, I refer to this when it arises from ideology (as it usually does) as an "ideological paralogic," a false "logic" that is used to argue for a fake reality. They want to manufacture this.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/12/psychopathy-origins-totalitarianism/

The media, after months of stoking division and inflaming everything (and while still doing it for its favored points) is also claiming that it can "induce national calm NOW" by pulling the same crap that inflamed the problems, just more selectively, more repressively.

The asymmetry is a crucial point to observe here too. They're using Repressive Tolerance ( https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html) as part of their paralogy. They're going to "induce national calm NOW" by silencing their enemies and continuing to force their pseudo-reality onto everyone.

Another parallel example of exactly this is when radical Islamists (not all Muslims!) insist that Islam is "a religion of peace," wherein what they mean is that when everyone believes THEIR NARROW THEOLOGY and submits to it, there will peace. Same, same, or very close.

It's pretty important that you learn to see this "discourse engineering," or, as Lyotard had it, "legitmation by paralogy," when and where it occurs. The media is high enough on its own supply now that it believes it can do it more or less without limitations on its power.

The most dangerous part of believing they can do it without limitations on its power is that that is dangerously wrong and will therefore be "fixed" by using increasing amounts of force and coercion. This is what the slide into totalitarianism and atrocity looks like.