Many of the recent scandals in politics and business involve governments or corporations manipulating news reporting. Here is a great site to explore this topic in depth.

Eight Major Trends from The State of the News Media 2004:

#2: Much of the new investment in journalism today - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom ...

#3: ... there is a tendency toward a jumbled, chaotic, partial quality in some reports, without much synthesis or even the ordering of the information. There is also a great deal of effort, particularly on cable news, that is put into delivering essentially the same news repetitively without any meaningful updating.

#4: [News organizations] are varying their news agenda, their rules on separating advertising from news and even their ethical standards ... reinforc[ing] the public perception ... that the news media lack professionalism and are motivated by financial and self-aggrandizing motives rather than the public interest.

#8: Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them.

And here are a few books that help separate propaganda from truth:

Weapons of Mass Deception

Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You

Media Wars: News at a Time of Terror

Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America's Culture to the World (see also an interview with the author here.)

Who's to say how sinister all this is--it starts to feel like conspiracy theory madness once you start reading. But there's no denying that the quality of broadcast news has deteriorated greatly, and we're a weaker democracy as a result. Maybe the spread of independent media will fill the gap between corporate news and real information, and encourage the big outfits to get to the real news faster.