To understand Mass Media is to be on the other side of the curtain. To see that there is no great and terrible Oz, only a little man pulling the levers. Mass Media is and has always been about making money.
Our news items, Tv and radio broadcasts, magazine articles, movies and music are all about making money. The truth is secondary to the dollar.
For an example, Monsanto sued two small dairies to prevent them from labeling their milk as coming from cows not injected with growth hormone. When this was reported by Fox news, the reaction was that Fox fired both the news director and the general manager. The new general manager, Dave Boylan, explained that if the reporters on this story didn’t agree to changes that Monsanto and Fox lawyers were insisting upon, they’d be fired for insubordination within 48 hours. When the reporters protested that they reported the truth, His reply: “We paid $3 billion dollars for these TV stations. We’ll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!”
This shows that it is the corporation and the businesses that tell us what the truth is.
It's not just TV either. Textbooks often delete historical fact in order to keep a bias or agenda. It never gets put into the books that Woodrow Wilson was a racist and had all persons of color working in the White House fired when he became president, or that Helen Keller was a radical socialist and was on a government watch list. These and other items are always deleted from our textbooks.
Movies rewrite history, TV changes facts to make biographies more palatable and news tells us what the corporations allow them to. And all of it is controlled by the dollar.