I see no point trying to extricate the media from the government. The media - and, nowadays, the internet pseudo-monopolies, which means all the same people anyway - is the government and vice-versa. If the media conglomerates, of which there are really only four or five at the top level of the hierarchy in the entire English-speaking world, choose to combine their full power, they can guarantee any given sociopolitical outcome -- in exchange, the politico beneficiaries work for the business owners and their friends.
The lines between the historical "estates"/"columns" were blurred a long time ago and then eroded completely. The internet served as an information liberation front for a time - a brief interlude for us, and an extremely irritating obstacle to the media tycoons - but they found a way around this utopian unmediated exchange of ideas with time, technological advancement and ideas of their own.
By aggregating and "conglomerating" the internet (see also: the whole of social media), they made it even more effective and efficient for sentiment manipulation than traditional/legacy media. Self-admittedly, their efforts were redoubled after the anomalies of 2016 both here and there (Trump worked out in the end for the traditional aristocratic elites but I think they're in rare disagreement with the nouveau Silicon Valley set there). The Valley lot have the will and plenty of power to, as the Google execs put it, "prevent a repeat of 2016", so it's going to be an interesting year and an interesting conflict between the old and new guards since I don't see the real powermongers throwing their weight against a tamed incumbent.
Anyway, yeah, the legacy media is garbage but so is the Facebook-Google-Twitter axis. It's redundant to name both since they're entwined beyond most people's credulity, and continue to prop each other up in a united front against plebeian wrongthink IRL and plebeian conversation online. Alphabet loves to give money to struggling establishment news businesses for ideological reasons. Ostensibly, it's a dying, loss-making industry in which every major player would already be bankrupt or irreconcilably deep in the red without handouts from the elite, but it's really a loss leader: losing trivial sums for control of all readily available sources of information is actually just good calculus.
In other words there are very few puppeteers but many puppets.
Plain English please.