The free press is one of the legitimizing symbols of US democracy. Americans are bombarded with the message that they enjoy an independent media, free of censorship or state-owned news outlets like those found in other countries. Let's look at the facts.
Thomson Reuters Special Services, a subsidiary of the Reuters news wire service used by virtually all mainstream media, has held 80 contracts with ICE worth nearly $75M. Thomson Reuters employees help ICE track changes in personal information to refine ICE agents' target lists.
The CEO of Thomson Reuters Special Services is a board member at the ICE Foundation, which runs pro-ICE PR campaigns. Can Reuters really call itself independent from the US government and its prison-industrial complex?
NPR’s CEO & president, John Lansing, is the former chief of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that oversees all the US state propaganda outlets born out of the Cold War. These outlets include Voice of America, RadioFreeEurope-Radio Liberty, & Radio Free Asia. 
Even a publication like Vice, which markets itself as subversive, has regularly used State Department propaganda outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for sources, photos, videos, quotes, and even entire stories — without disclosing that they're using US state-funded content.
Vox, another "new media" outlet targeted at millennials, has been essentially a Comcast subsidiary since its very beginning. Yet Vox rarely discloses these ties in its puff pieces for Comcast and the cable giant's partial owner, Bill Gates.
Where do the conflicts of interest lie in cable news? The short answer: everywhere. CNN, for one, has aggressively sought out sponsorship revenue from US-aligned Gulf states like Bahrain. In 2012 the network refused to air a documentary they produced on the Bahraini protests.
But one practice that has guaranteed cable news networks' friendly coverage of US imperialism is embedded reporting. That's when supposedly objective journalists attach to US army units & do all their news coverage under the troops' close protection.
The US military has had great success with this practice since introducing it during the invasion of Iraq. Around 600 (mostly US & UK) war reporters — from the likes of CNN, ABC, & NBC — enthusiastically volunteered for the Pentagon's embedded reporting program in Iraq.
The coverage was predictably favorable, whitewashing the brutal US occupation of Iraq. The UK's Ministry of Defense commissioned an analysis of the print output produced by embedded journalists, and found that 90% of their reporting was either "positive or neutral."
These realities make it unsurprising that corporate media faithfully promotes the US government line on all matters of imperialism. After all, this media is owned by the same people that profit the most from US imperialism. It's dedicated to upholding their class interests.
