some might consider the following article to be longer than their attention span but if you make time you'll have lots of things to consider and be informed about concerning the state of 'our free press' and the implications of it all;

Requiem for a (sort of) free press in the US

Where Did the Tradition of Journalists Speaking Truth to Power Go?

Posted on January 5, 2019 by Dave LIndorff

Plenty of press, not much freedom

It’s easy to let time and nostalgia get in the way of remembering what American journalism was really like back in the last century. Certainly it was not all Watergate and Pentagon Papers exposés, and even those two prime examples of the media’s standing up to government threats and taking on the powerful were not easy to get past the owners and managers of the media and into print and on the air.
That said, it’s clear to me — a journalist who’s seen a lot over my 47 years in the business — that what we have today in the US in terms of what passes for journalism in the corporate mainstream is a pale imitation of what we had back in the 1960s and ‘70s.
We got a glimpse how badly the profession and the news media themselves have decayed in a complaint made public Friday by a reporter who quit NBC News.
William M. Arkin, a long-time investigative reporter at NBC News, offers a scathing criticism of the employer he left after 30 years with the network. In an email message to his NBC News bosses and to the colleagues he is leaving, Arkin, one of the few reporters in the mainstream media to insist, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by US forces, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the argument the Bush/Cheney Administration used to justify a war of aggression against that country in 2003 — wrote:............https://thiscantbehappening.net/where-did-the-tradition-of-journalists-speaking-truth-to-power-go/