We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.
Who knows what some people will do these days, just for that.
Well, we actually have a pretty good idea, without all the gory details.
But I know what you mean, it's not too easy for multiple sources to be on the same page even when they really try sometimes.
However, only the few most popular are what most people listen to, and those biggies are usually well aware of each others' stance. On an ongoing basis. And if a combined effort were to take place nothing else would have a chance.
Sometimes even sharing personnel, concurrently and/or sequentially, which can also lay the groundwork for approaches that seem competitive but are really complementary. As designed with a single, possibly obscured agenda designed from the ground up to deceive.
Things like this might be why "trust but verify" may have to be deprecated, and reversed to "verify and still be skeptical" if the propaganda keeps getting worse.
The NYT intentionally runs stories that are highly dubious or they know to be false, then later issue a small retraction in a footnote.
The latest fake news they published was the story around Zohran Mamdani where they used hacked data from Colombia University to claim he checked "black" on the admission documents to gain an unfair advantage. That's because they are partisan hacks. I don't necessarily like Zohran, but he represented a threat to mainstream Democrats therefore the NYT had to do something about him.
I saw a similar theme in right-wing American propaganda wherein American conservatives know that their media is biased, but they assume that "mainstream media" is just as bad.
It seems like in all of these cases, propagandists aren't trying to get people to believe the propaganda, but rather to discredit the entire idea of objective facts or reliable reporting.
The only way to create a true counter weight is the amount of time encompassing the false hood should be the same amount of time given to the retraction. 1 day of false hood should equal 1 day of retraction.
Will this mode of operation exist, most likely not. The closest the USA had to such would be the Fairness Doctrine. [0]
Okay, if there is any such thing as objective truth then this (by which i mean your statement that there should not be conflicting narratives, not the statement about the vaccine itself) is objectively false.
The COVID vaccines were pressed into widespread public distribution on an emergency use authorization; any other newly-developed vaccine would have spent years mired in clinical trials and debate. The first COVID vaccines deployed would have taken even longer because they were also the first mRNA vaccines. There was not by any means a consensus that they were safe or effective, only that the risk was justifiable in light of a sudden global health crises.
If some media comes disagreeing, they are blatantly lying. Also, there should not be diverging narratives about whether if you jump off a cliff, you will fall.
The effect is so strong and universal that everybody finds it.
And also have a diversified professional media, so that the money leaves a track.
Edit after down votes: The paragraph above was meant on why would one expect conflicting narratives not from different sources, as the Parent Comment stated, but rather from supposedly official sources or propaganda outlets. My bad, must have read the comment on a hurry.
The parenthetical is doing a lot of work. The only real truth is that which you experience with your own senses. For everything else, you are choosing to believe somebody else's truth. It's worth remembering that whenever you consume media.
Be wary of overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, though. Science may say that the measles vaccine is 99.7% effective, but if your kid comes down with a rash 3 days after a high fever and a week after being exposed to a known measles case, it starts from head down, and they've got white spots in their mouth - congratulations, they're probably in the 0.3%. Likewise, science may say that men are on average better in spatial and mathematical reasoning than women, but if you meet a top-notch woman programmer in your job, believe your experience, not the science. That science makes a conclusion about the averages doesn't prevent you from having an outlier right in front of you.