I think the pro-establishment lean of media back in the day (and advocacy for the Iraq war is a great example) is really the heart of the problems we've got today. Society and media is reacting to the overly heavy censorship of established platforms - but what we're seeing today with widely embraced conspiracy theories is pretty dangerous to society.

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.