The CIA doesn't need to do much to convince the right to hate China, to hate USSR, to hate communism, to hate anti-imperialism. But as the CIA realized almost from the outset, if they could convince the American left to hate those groups, well that's real control.
They've been very successful. The anti-communist culture is so strong, some news probably match the CIA line perfectly w/o needing a single CIA asset in their midst. A thread on the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the first major CIA project in this area:
I should note- I say 'the CIA', but even early on this was a project of a number of groups, and now many government branches and countless government-funded-non-governmental-organizations (makes sense right?) do this work- State Department, CIA, US Agency for Global Media, etc et
Alternative media sources, especially supposedly socialist ones, play a key role preventing people from actually becoming socialist, which I talk about here.
Like I talk about in the thread quoted above, all of these 'socialist' or 'alternative' news sources fail on anti-imperialism. To add to that, they often do it in an interesting way; they only support anti-imperialist groups that are nowhere near political power
This is a useful approach as it gives the guise of being anti-imperialist while not supporting any anti-imperialist groups with a chance to win. Materially it's meaningless. Some of the 'anti-imperialist' groups they support are even weakening anti-imperialist governments!
Jacobin is the exemplar of this approach, in Brazil for instance only supporting small parties and unions and ignoring major socialist groups. Black Rose/Rosa Negra, not to be outdone, attacked PT right before the election, blaming them for the rise of Bolsonaro 
Of course the irony is Bolsonaro received a whole lot of support from the same government BRRN does- the US. Our comrade @cholo_commie has some good threads on that group
Something that's seen not just in pretend socialist news sources, but all US news sources, is the illusion of a wide spectrum of news sources. The US government/bourgeoisie has realized it's easier to preserve that by controlling news at the root
Take for instance China- all these hundreds of US news sources, from CNN to Fox to Democracy now report on China. And they ALL cite Radio Free Asia (another non-governmental government project). Same thing in the DPRK, and to different extents in many other countries
This not only makes controlling news more efficient (you don't need assets at every media source) but it still preserves this appearance of a wide range of viewpoints agreeing on this issue. That's pretty powerful to an unaware consumer.
Remember all this the next time you see a news story about Marxist students being oppressed in China. Why would the bourgeois press want to publish that? Bourgeois news is not arbitrary, it's a weapon of truths, half-truths, and lies, aimed at crushing workers movements.
