Therein lies the rub of your conundrum. It isn't the "programming" per se: it's the advertising between (the actual financial 'product' that news programs are arranged around). From birth to death, the morality of western market societies is determined by corporations. "A corporation is a pile of money to which a group of men have sworn moral allegiance." -Wendell Berry
The towel was thrown in for you when corporations were invented (Limited Liability). Brainwashing children is tax-deductible. The income tax code spends money on war before you have any say in it. American liberals believe deep in their hearts that sales taxes are "regressive", yet every solution they come up with is dependent on rich people and rich corporations to exist so they would have someone to tax to 'help' the 'poor' with complex schemes that always seem to need to hire more analysts and schemers.
Competition, bullying, advertising, religion (I repeat myself) and market saturation with lizard-brain trigger tools has created a world where everyone wants everything and nobody knows the costs because knowing the costs would slow down The Invisible Hand Job called The Economy.
Ultimately, our morality is determined by our anthropocentric selfishness, isolated by civilization's walls from the risks and response ability of the environment that spawned us. Everyone's solutions involve some version of 'less selfishness' ('green' economy, wealth redistribution) rather than generosity.
That's not morality. It's just procrastination. Americans buy guns, motorcycles, giant TVs and politicians because they are available to buy, and humans innately need to feel they are in control (instinctively: where their next meal will come from). Advertisers sell movies that portray guns as solutions to problems, rather than as creators of different problems. They don't make movies about cleaning up after wars and murders(except profitable detective shows selling guns or documentaries that only self-serving academics will watch). There's no money in it.
One dollar really does equal one vote: and that dollar votes for the other dollars, usually at a checkout where the votes are actually counted and used effectively for the sake of even more dollars.
