I see.. so you're saying jennivinson is wrong....
and the the American MsM is NOT skirting sedition and political espionage?.. EH!...
Perhaps the author just doesn't write well, and meant to say something like “What the Founding Fathers envisioned was a Press that was completely independent of governmental control.” - which would still be incorrect (for example the Founders never envisioned a rack of Hustlers behind every convince store counter) but at least would be coherent. In fact what they expected – and what they got – was a highly partisan press often closely aligned with “party” interests; this after all was a country and a press that had just experienced a period which valorized the person and works of wildly read Revolutionary Propagandists such as Thomas Paine.
Personally, I'd enjoy lining in a country with a lively and politically diverse mass media of the sort which thrived in print shops of the post Revolutionary America, and perhaps given the “Internet” I'll live to see it.
As for what “happened” to the “Conservative” media, it appears to me that public assess to conservative opinion in the “professional” media has greatly increased in the the last 25 years, to take one example Fox News is clearly well to the “right” of any US Mass Media existent in 1970, another is that political talk radio – which has expanded greatly in influence during this periods – remains on a total listener-ship basis primarily the province of conservative opinion.
This of course begs the question of how it is that we find ourselves in a position where large numbers of both Liberals and Conservatives are convinced that the media distorts reporting in favor of the other's opinions.
The answer, I'd say, is that US mass media primarily represents the interests, concerns and goals of it's corporate ownership, and this ownership while certainly “conservative”” represents only one faction of “conservative opinion”, and that while this opinion is not monolithic, neither is it representative of political opinion at a place like FR. Rupert Murdoch is quite willing to present viewers of Fox's English language news programming with a range of opinion including quite vehement anti-immigration commentary – while at the same time Fox Sports en Espanol continues it's aggressive efforts to expand viewer ship of it's Spanish Language outlets in US markets.
In such a situation a lot of people, both liberal and conservative, start to experience a pretty serious disconnect between their own experience and opinion and the underlying message conveyed by Corporate Media.
As for efforts to suppress political opinion in the mass media, at the moment almost all serious call for such efforts come from the conservatives – for example many commentators here on FR would clearly prefer that the US press operate under something much like Great Britain's Official Secrets Act.
To a certain extent this reflects that fact that with a Republican Administration in office it's mostly Republican Oxes that are getting gored, but to some extent IMO it reflects the fact that many “conservatives”, despite an aversion and distrust toward “big government”, are a bit too ready to let partisan fever blind them to the fact that they may like these powers less when they are vested in a Democratic administration.