Proper consumption of biased news sources requires a finer-toothed comb than “pro-government is bad, and therefore is compromised by the government.”
Proper consumption of biased news sources requires a finer-toothed comb than “pro-government is bad, and therefore is compromised by the government.”
There’s a double standard here though - many of the same people who defend US media as “not state affiliated just because it has a pro-government bias” will then label Hungarian media “state-affiliated” when similarly it isn’t under direct state control, it is just owned by private interests with a pro-government bias.
Many things can be bad at once, in many different ways!
Both are bad, but equating between the two doesn’t do anybody any particular service: they have different proximate causes, and different remediations.
You'd have to ignore Snowden and all the leaks of the past 20 to 50 years, to have such a misconception of how the USG operates. You'd have to have the USG's trustworthiness as the pillar of your belief system and then comes the usual philosophy. That's exceptionalism and xenophobia.
Usually when people talk about the CIA being involved with American media, it's in relation to things like Operation Mockingbird, but as far as I know Snowden didn't reveal anything about programs like that. Snowden revealed things like the existence of PRISM, and the Washington Post (along with The Guardian) was one of the first newspapers to publish such revelations.
Confusing the media’s (noted) biases for compromise is an error in principled media consumption.