That your friends are critical of most other media lines is most likely due to the culture of US media criticism that CN is trying to contribute to. It sounds to me more like an indication that someone else should pick up the torch and handle those issues specifically.

If they took on Russia, especially, they would most likely get banned from most platforms and have their patreon taken down before too long. You've seen that happen before with other programs. As the Cold War escalates, that will probably apply to China and NK too (actually it already sometimes happens with NK).

Just yesterday or the day before on lemmy, I saw one of our comrades link a bunch of sources in a comment, including episode 8 of Citations Needed. The response? Their interlocutor ignored basically everything except that Greenwald was on the show and, because Greenwald correctly denies that Russia successfully "attacked" the US via hacking in 2016, which they took as evidence that everything involved was a waste of time.