Was the Iraq war a one-off event where media held far too much trust and abused it? Is it just the continuation of a pattern of media being used as a tool of the state (either wittingly or unwittingly)? I'm leaning toward the second option but I still don't know if the inherent pro-establishment bias you get with large media conglomerates outweighs the benefits of vetted news.
The only thing I can say for sure is that public media funding (like PBS and the like) to subsidize the cost of media companies ends up having rather little effect on those outlets' biases, while forcing media to depend on corporate sponsorship absolutely does corrupt the messaging delivered to the populace at large. So I'm not certain what our media landscape should look like, but I'm definitely against people who decry any government sponsorship of news as being political mouthpieces - public radio and tv should form part of our news digest, their funding is diverse enough to allow them to freely criticize both national and local governments and while it probably won't yield the really valuable investigative journalism we need to fight corruption it's definitely part of the solution.
From the NY Times itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...)
"But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.
On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified."