OT? Well, I talked about different standards and why I came to read about them in the media. So I really started the tangent before you. :-)
Sensationalism and jingoism comes with times of war/terror. That excuse is not relevant for my local Swedish media.
(Even democracies do realpolitik and lie about it. Foreigners don't have votes at home. This is a built in disadvantage of democracies, I guess.)
_I have compared Swedish media with BBC and NY Times since 7-8 years_
Neither of which is, in my experience, particularly reliable (although there's less of the blatant bias/censorship that you described). Comparing them against AJE (which has had it's own issues of late, in the /same/ direction) reveals that their reporting is severely biased toward sensational stories - every article needs a good guy, and bad guy, a winner, and a looser. And the good guy is then implied to be aligned with American interests, even if they're Al Qaeda-backed "islamists"[1] (not to say that said folk aren't aligned with American interests at times).
[1] Which can be interpreted anywhere from "Muslim" to "what Glenn Beck said".