If you only just started paying attention to the inner workings of the media industry, you might think America’s information environment transformed overnight.

In the past few months, a president extracted settlements from media giants as his apparatchiks vowed state retribution against his opponents – all as they defunded public media at a time when the president’s biggest boosters own the algorithms that decide what information is amplified and suppressed.

Meanwhile, media companies are merging into ever-larger behemoths, some have muzzled White House critics as their companies seek presidential favors, and the White House is reportedly brokering a deal to hand yet another social media platform over to his billionaire allies.

And now, a media industry billionaire has placed CBS News under the control of the conservative provocateur Bari Weiss, who is empowered to shroud her culture war and oligarch-friendly economics in what she calls “journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual”.

But as abrupt as this Orwellian turn may seem, it is no sudden pivot – it is instead the culmination of a scheme launched a half-century ago by some of America’s most influential power brokers, as our new book Master Plan exposes. Sketched out in never-before-reported documents, this plot aimed to destroy accountability journalism and make news outlets into champions rather than adversaries of power.

If that seems like exaggeration, consider that almost exactly 50 years before Weiss’s appointment, CBS’s own president was boasting of his support for a conservative, antidemocratic political project and bragging about his efforts to shift his news division’s media coverage away from scrutinizing corporate power.

It was a harbinger of what was to come.

This untold story of American media began in the news business’s Watergate-era transition. In the first half of the 20th century, journalism had swung between the triumphs of investigative reporting and the excesses of Citizen Kane-like oligarchs wielding their media properties as political weapons. But by the early 1970s, the pendulum was swinging back toward the muckrakers – journalism had once again become a problem for the ruling class, exposing national security and corporate scandals – and giving a platform to advocates like Ralph Nader who were holding power accountable.

Irate about Nader and other troublemakers, a prominent tobacco industry attorney named Lewis Powell penned a 1971 call to arms for the nation’s largest lobbying group, the Chamber of Commerce, and its corporate members.

He noted that “most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive” – and that therefore they should start deliberately amplifying defenders........

© The Guardian