In the old Soviet Union, the oppressed subjects of regime had a phrase used to describe the news media: "There's no pravda in Izvestia and there's no izvestia in Pravda." In Russian, "Pravda," the leading Communist Party periodical, means "Truth," and "Izvestia," the principal state periodical, means "News."
The bosses of the Kremlin had no interest in their subjects knowing anything about the world or having any honest opinions expressed. Instead, the news media (also all cultural life, all educational institutions, all common means of ordinary people sharing anything together) was placed in the hands of bureaucratic flacks, well-trained in determining what constituted news and who had the legal monopoly on truth.
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." Thomas Jefferson