[Itse]

Also, pushing your view into the media is pretty trivial. Most news outlets are kind of desperate for content at all times, so basically any news release that has any real news value at all tends to get printed pretty much as is.

Especially if it's on a topic of high interest such as the Russo-Ukrainian war or right now the war in Gaza, pretty much anything a government puts out about those will get printed just as surely as it would if a totalitarian government literally told a media to print it.

The difference with media in the West and China is more that in the West there are always numerous competing narratives. There's a ton of Russian and Chinese propaganda too.for example.

Editorial independence in the 24/7 news world is a somewhat theoretical concept, because these days everything gets published by default if there's any chance people will click the article. Sometimes a single press release will get spun into a dozen articles if the topic is really hot but there's a shortage of stuff to report. (Again, the war in Ukraine was like this at times.)

The government in a democracy can at times successfully put a lid on some stories, and if it puts a lot of effort in the US government especially can quite successfully control the narrative on some topics some of the time... but it has no chance of controlling all medias and all stories all of the time. Critical and differing views still get out. They might not get as much attention, and often the critical narratives start coming out months or years after the fact, but they do generally get out. Of course that doesn't matter if people don't read those stories.