Legacy of Ashes, p. 77:

> Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation's leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time's Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek's man in Tokyo. It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government's wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information, once part of Wild Bill Donovan's domain. The men who responded to the CIA's call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Look, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader's Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany's most powerful press baron. Dulles wanted to be seen as the subtle master of a professional spy service. The press dutifully reflected that image. But the archives of the CIA tell a different story.

One of the less speculative ones is that a lot of the NYT's glossy front-page publicism would be rendered much more difficult and expensive if government goodwill were withdrawn from it (and so it could no longer embed its staff with US military campaigns, would lose access to quotes from "anonymous defense officials" and what-not and might not be among the first to be informed if e.g. the government wants to tell the press that they shot down an Iranian drone). This probably extends to access to insiders who are not directly employed by the US government, but part of the wider "beltway culture" (work for think tanks, government contractors and sub^n-contractors etc.) and therefore under significant social (and maybe professional, to the extent they require security clearance) pressure to at least outwardly defend US government interests and shun those who are considered to be a risk to them.

See reporting regarding WMD or any other official justification for any war.

It's just a necessary part of the military to be able to distribute information to motivate overt activities. Because soldiers and the public will not tolerate military action without moral justification. And the reality is, military activity is not based on moral issues. Rather it is strategic. For example, activities in the middle east have not been isolated instances of "preserving democracy" as portrayed. Rather they are part of a continuous, many-decade regional strategic effort related to resources, territorial control, etc.

Look at a map. Does it seem like a coincidence that the bad guys just happened to be in a small section of the world and just happened to be on either side of Iran?

In fact in some ways the roots of this conflict go back centuries.

More importantly: in the situation where the majority of "free" press is controlled by 5-6 people, it's more profitable to exert this market power rather than to do government bidding for free. So US press is not quite Pravda, but it also has very little to do with reporting the facts, and that factual component has markedly diminished as the press entered a period of decline 10-15 years ago. Now it's just mostly driving clicks through opinion columns misrepresented as news, and fomenting outrage.

There are a few columns that do not missrepresent the facts by some ethical journalists but due existing in the same websites and news outlets where columns that only exist to drive clicks is hard for the readers to tell them apart.

As an aside is interesting you are being downvoted and flagged, it seems as censoring more than people just disagreeing