Did you notice how the quality of the results returned by google degraded over the years? When it started they had to take out of the market the competition and they strived to return the best possible results. When they became an oligopoly with their alter ego bing they begun to restrict the navigation to the sites in their friendly network.

The other big sites played the same game sharing links mostly with the other big known sites, the media took part in the game by attracting the attention on those big known sites. A combination of restricted horizon, but with overload of information to reduce the users need to look outside that horizon. This is the result you see today.