Eeehhhh... at a media business level, I agree with you. The media corporations are interlinked and do have an agenda, and do suck off one another. However, I have worked in, and still have many friends who are journalists both in the US and abroad, who write for reputable organizations (The Independent, The Economist, Financial Times, Le Monde, etc), and the on-the-ground world of active journalism is not homogenous enough, nor organized enough, for such sweeping generalizations to be true. I know how these guys and gals find their stories. I know how they write them. I know how they pitch the stories to their editors. And I know what their drafts look like before the editors and title-writers get ahold of them. We used to all sit in one room together and I'd listen to the gory details of how the industry works from the journalist/correspondent level. There is no "plan" or "agenda" at that level. These guys, on the ground, in war zones, are simply walking around, sticking their noses in, and writing about what they see. Any "contact" or "expert" they are given to speak to by their editor is taken with an enormous block of salt, because they do not know that person's motivations, connections, agenda, etc. As for leeching off each other, that can also be an indication of opportunity. You see refugees coming down the road. You talk to them. They say they are coming from Port Blahblah because armed gangs in military garb are breaking into houses and causing mayhem. So you try to get transport to Port Blahblah. But you are stopped at a military roadblock. So you try to get around it via different routes. But you can't get there. Finally, after a week, a fixer says he can get you in there. So you grab the opportunity and go. There are two other journalists with you. You get in to Port Blahblah, write a story about what you find there, and send it back to your editor. The story breaks in two different news outlets at once. All the other outlets grab the basic details of your story, and write their own spin on it, because Port Blahblah is the story of the day, and they can't be behind the curve. But... is any of this orchestrated? Or planned? Simply, no. Does Fox News refer to the people in Port Blahblah as "terrorists", and MSNBC refer to them as "insurgents", and others refer to them as "elements in opposition to Commander Dingleberry's regime"? Yes. Because they put their narrative spin on the story to make it fit the agenda of the people who sign their checks. But the journalists? Shit. By then they are at a bar in Lower Buttholesville, drinking like fish, bitching about the sensationalist title the editor put on their story, and waiting for their taxi driver's cousin to get back to them about whether the road to Upper Buttholesville is open or not. In short, find reliable writers. Follow them wherever they post from, no matter which media outlet is putting out their stories. The Media is not a single coherent and predictable thing. It's an ecosystem.
I think you're confusing my description of a "consensus opinion" with a "plan" or "agenda." Sure, there's orchestration and an attempt at manipulation with varying degrees of success (my favorite books on the subject are The Hunting of the President and The Mighty Wurlitzer). But the manipulation is just one factor in shaping the broad scatterplot of narrative that may be wide, may be narrow, may be right, may be wrong, but is most assuredly centered around a commonality. The Bush administration worked real hard to sell the idea of WMDs in Iraq. All sorts of talented journalists worked real hard to dispel the idea of WMDs in Iraq. There was no shortage of opinions on either side, and even with Colin Powell standing up in Congress the logic of the narrative tended to support "no WMDs." But the consensus opinion became "WMDs in Iraq" because that's the way the herd went. Were there cowboys? Sure. Were there rogue doggies? Sure. But the bulk of the information available was "WMDs in Iraq." So no. Not orchestrated. not planned. But at the end of the day, there are more people saying one thing than saying the other thing, and a lot of that is because nobody cares quite so much about what journalists think and say than other journalists. If you're wrong when everyone else is wrong you walk it off. If you're right while everyone else is wrong you die. So we're back to this: yeah, if you set an RSS feed to ping you whenever Greg Palast says stuff, you'll get a Palastful feed of news. But if you open a paper, you'll see something else entirely different. And it doesn't really matter which paper, either. THAT is a consensus opinion.In short, find reliable writers. Follow them wherever they post from, no matter which media outlet is putting out their stories.