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Modern western national security journalism is mostly just writing what a government official tells you to write and then calling it a "scoop" which you got from a nameless "source" in the government. One of the many, many problems with this system of news reporting is that it gives the government a tremendous amount of leverage over mass media outlets, because if The New York Times or CNN don't write what a government agency or official wants them to write, they can lose access to that "source" and all the "scoops" that come with it. If The New York Times started doing actual journalism and closely scrutinizing the US intelligence cartel for example, the CIA could just decide that NYT is now off limits and all the insider "scoops" go to different outlets instead. The New York Times would then immediately lose prominence while someone else gains it, and they'd lose all the clicks and subscriptions they were getting from being a consistent source of breaking news on that front. Which is why that never happens. A symbiotic relationship has been created in which news outlets benefit from powerful sources and powerful sources benefit from uncritical news reporting. The news outlets report what they're told to report in order to keep their steady supply of "scoops", and in exchange they get all the money and prestige that goes with it. The government gets uncritical regurgitation of talking points which serve the information interests of the western empire in that moment. This is access journalism at its most pernicious. Access journalism is destructive enough when it's a prominent official refusing to give interviews to unsympathetic reporters, but once you've got entire government agencies driving the entire news media information sphere by determining who does and does not receive "scoops" on foreign conflicts and international affairs, you've got a system of straight up state propaganda. What is the effective difference between this system and one in which the state owns the media and tells it what to report? In essence, there is no difference.