To expand on the second sentence, centuries ago news was little more than propaganda to appease the peasant classes - "we've invaded the next village and won, we're great" - all delivered by a town crier or equivalent. I don't believe we ever really went beyond that too much. Here in the UK, there's no such thing as a non-partizan newspaper - every newspaper is pushing an agenda, people buy the newspaper that the rest of their tribe reads, they all get enraged about the same things and those are the things that someone, somewhere, wants them to get enraged about because it serves some need that the proles don't need to worry their silly little heads about.
All of this is not to say that some individual people within the news machines are not incredible, hard working, honest people doing extremely important work. There are many. But when that hard work conflicts with the wishes of the puppeteer, it's bumped to page 28 and quickly dropped.
The Horizon / Post Office scandal is a perfect, and timely, example of this. Some journalists were banging that drum for years, yet it never hit the front pages despite being the biggest miscarriage of justice the UK has ever seen. Only when a terrestrial TV channel turned it into a drama, coincidentally in an election year, is it suddenly on the front pages with our politicians blaming the other side and our newspapers happily printing the talking points fed to them. Now the few elites want us to know about it, specifically so that they can score some points and use it for electioneering.
