As a fellow J-School grad (the Dean of my college of Journalism was a former U.S. Press Secretary), I couldn’t agree with you more. Shortly after graduating, I asked the major metropolitan daily I was working for whether I could cover a workfare scam that fingered the County Executive, and was told the subject was too touchy. Objective reporting may have been a myth sold us by the purveyors of false narratives. Even that triumph of Investigative Journalism, Watergate, turns out to have been a Deep State maneuver that used reporters as pawns.

Back in the early days of American Journalism, in the time of Thomas Paine, Broadsheets seem to have been screeds knowingly biased and received as such. The idea that a media outlet could nanny information for us may have been an unrealistic expectation. The thing of it is, back then, narratives were nurtured by folk traditions, song, and word of mouth. They evolved slowly and changed slowly. Now we can shift narratives as easily as changing the channel on a remote. They might be on their way to becoming meaningless, at least to the extent that they are watered, or watered-down, by corporatist mouthpieces.

You can’t separate the journalism from the culture, and culture is a difficult thing to get an easy handle on. Back in the days of the U.S.S.R., when the headline in Pravda read, “Cabbage is Good for You” the peasant readers knew that meant the wheat crop had failed. And yet we in America called ourselves free and them oppressed. We’re not living in the free world, and we never were. Our Freedom wasn’t so free, and their Oppression {wasn’t so oppressive} (https://www.theglobalist.com/for-whom-the-wall-fell-a-balance-sheet-of-the-transition-to-capitalism/).

Let’s work together with other cultures like Russia to better understand ourselves and each other, and to fight common battles, like those in the environmental arena, and income inequality.