Upton Sinclair (“The Brass Check”) and George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia and private letters) would beg to differ. Sinclair wrote over 100 years ago about how the AP were the captive stenographers of the powers that be (the titular brass check referred to a token carried by prostitutes, showing what he thought of the bought and paid for media). Orwell almost 100 years ago wrote in the context of the Spanish Civil War about how the press would completely invent stories in favor of the government narrative, while ignoring any stories inconvenient to it. I don’t think these phenomena are anything new, it’s that we have much more information about how things actually work in the age of the Internet than we did in the age of 3 TV channels, let alone the age of William Randolph Hearst basically inventing the pretexts for the Spanish-American War.