I have remarked on this issue for years and also argued the necessity of an organized alternative media controlled by the grassroots. So, I welcome others who are now becoming aware of the controlled nature of mainstream media. I have a perspective of 60 years as an adult activist who started noticing blatantly skewed monolithic mainstream media coverage when the latter were covering issues related to the Cuban government after their revolution in 1959. Of course, I was keenly aware that the media under ownership and sponsorship of major corporations have always to a more limited extent provided biased coverage, however this trend of propaganda skewed coverage increased during the Vietnam War, and accelerated most dramatically since 9/11. What I now see today are symptoms which suggest that major media are under tightly organized and centralized control, something like what Orwell described as the "Ministry of Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
So, the question remains as to how major media is so well managed and coordinated to produce such monolithic propaganda. I read in Sibel Edmond's recently published outstanding book of political fiction, The Lone Gladio, in which she has CIA personnel located in every major media outlet. This makes complete sense to me because there have been many reports in the past of journalists paid by the CIA in such books as The Mighty Wurlitzer by Hugh Wilford. On pages 226-227 he writes:
Estimates of the number f U.S. reporters who carried out secret assignments for the CIA vary: in 1973, the Agency itself conceded,in the face of questioning from newspaper publishers, a figure of "some three dozen"; a congressional inquiry conducted in 1976 concluded that the total was more like fifty; a year later, Carl Bernstein calculated that as many as four hundred American journalist had worked for the CIA sin 1952.Now, I think it is likely that CIA personnel sit at the highest levels of management in media corporations to insure that the organizations report the news "correctly".