News organizations like CNN and The Atlantic are no longer worried about keeping up false pretenses. They are owned, operated, and propagated by the Chinese Communist Party. They have been for a while, but now they've stopped pretending otherwise.

In 1976, Network blew the whistle, sort of, on Saudi influence over mainstream media. Despite being a controversial and whimsical movie about the cynicism of American media, it also acted as a private joke among television executives who saw the satirical take on their industry as being not very far from the truth.

Fast forward three decades and the Saudis still had plenty of control in media, but that control was waning. The Chinese Communist Party was deep into their own worldwide campaign of pro-China propaganda and the vacuum left by the Saudi’s quiet exit in the U.S. allowed the CCP to swoop in and fill the void. But they went further than being minor influencers of the news as the Saudis were. They strove to control the narrative, and bit by bit they’ve been able to do so increasingly over the last two decades.

Today, they control many if not most of the American media outlets. Oh, they don’t control them through ownership or even infiltration. They control them through censorship. The risk of being forced out of the second most lucrative market in the world is too daunting for most major media outlets to ignore. They have to keep a CCP-approved narrative at all times while suppressing any hints of anti-CCP narratives from coming forward.

The Chinese Communist Party is fickle, after all, and they’ve flexed their muscles to American mainstream media outlets on a regular basis. Cross them and you will be punished.