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The reality is that, just like the people of North Korea, we are being manipulated by the media (including social media). In the case of North Korea, by the paucity of media. In our case, by the abundance.

Let the viewer/reader/listener beware.

The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing. The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . . .
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
We are being manipulated, not so much by the actual abundance of media but by the apparent abundance of media.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
Since the advent of the Associated Press in 1848 (and of other wire services later), all major journalism has been in continuous meeting since the Civil War. Consequently it is extremely naive to assume that journalists are not conspiring against the public.
The conspiracy functions in plain sight, because it operates via propaganda. Since journalism’s stock-in-trade is bad news, journalism inherently is negative towards society. Yet journalists all claim that journalism is objective. Which would only be true if “negativity is objectivity” - but that is a fine definition of “cynicism.” Cynicism towards society, which corresponds to naiveté towards its opposite, government. Journalism claims objectivity (which it uses in lieu of a claim of wisdom, which would too obviously be sophistry) and claims that anyone not cynical towards society is “not objective, not a journalist.” In consequence of which we still have a multitude of newspapers, but no ideological competition among them.