Most people assume the news is biased. Fewer people know exactly how the mechanism works and when it started.

In this episode, we go through the documented history of the relationship between American intelligence agencies and the media that's supposed to hold them accountable.

Starting with the part most people have never heard: in 2008, the New York Times fought the Pentagon in court for two years to obtain 8,000 pages of internal documents. What those documents revealed won a Pulitzer Prize. And then almost every television network refused to cover it because they were in it. The Pentagon had recruited more than 75 retired military officers and placed them on NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and ABC as "independent analysts." Their own internal paperwork called them "message force multipliers" - surrogates who could deliver official talking points to millions of Americans packaged as personal opinion.

Then we go back to 1975, when the Church Committee confirmed the CIA had maintained secret relationships with American journalists and media organizations for decades - something the CIA admitted in its own written statement.

Then forward to today, where the former Director of the CIA is a paid analyst on NBC, the former Director of National Intelligence is on CNN, and a former FBI deputy director fired for lying to investigators four times was hired by CNN months later.

We cover who actually owns the major American news networks, what the Jeff Bezos / Washington Post / Amazon CIA contract situation actually looks like on paper, and what Facebook quietly proved in a peer-reviewed study - that they could alter the emotional state of 693,000 users without their knowledge just by changing what those users were allowed to see in their feed.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's a paper trail. And once you see the shape of it, it's hard to unsee.

The system wasn't built for you. Build your own.