Nixon knew that if he did not exempt Berlin from the law, his actions would be remembered, come the next election. This illustrates that the government needs the media more than the media needs the government due to the fact the media has the ability to shape and form political discourse.
Also it is capable of disrupting the established paradigm, therefore threatening their dominant status.
The media and its patrons, the elite corporations and politicians, produce thought control among the non-elite, general populace. Indoctrination is the essence of democracy; propaganda to democracy is like violence to dictatorship. Mass communications has introduced new forms of social control and social cohesion suppressing dissident action. "No wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots" (Marcuse 9). Noam Chomsky, a notorious media critic, has proposed the propaganda model which "traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public" (Chomsky 2). The original information gathered by the press cannot be printed nor articulated before it goes through a process of filters.
The first filter illustrates the size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media. Here, one can distinguish between two types of media: the Agenda Setters and Mass Media. Harold Innis provides a guiltless definition of what an agenda setter is; "A complex system of writing becomes the possession of a special class and tends to support aristocracies" (Innis 4). Agenda setters are the larger media corporations that set the trends, for example, the New York Times, NBC, and CBS. The mass media are the "trickle down media", which get all their information from the agenda setters.