Yet anti-war protests were orders of magnitude stronger in the 1980s, Iran Contra was treated like real scandal [1] and politicians occasionally had to resign for misbehavior. Political awareness was much stronger than now and economic issues had far more screen time.

The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.

[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.