Having avoided traditional American news sources for a long time (10+ years), whenever I get a glimpse of it now (especially cable news sources), I always got the sense that this is exactly how American news is produced.
The content was undoubtedly exaggerated for dramatic effect to some extent, though I suspect the news production scenes were among the more documentary aspects of the film. Amazingly, they cast real Los Angeles local news anchors in the film (who happily consented to be in it!)
I'm also a consumer of what I would call serious, non-mainstream news sources: NPR, New York Times, Hacker News. But next time I was at the gym and caught the local news on one of the hanging big screen tvs, I saw it in a completely different light. Just as the film depicted.
It's not propaganda in the way described here. But I found it pretty shocking and unsettling.
Poor Russia, the first country to put a man in space, now reduced to copying propaganda machines!
The man in space flew on a rocket initially designed in Nazi Germany.
If you don't believe me, just google what different TV channels or online magazines said about obama care. Some praised it to the high heavens, others made it out to be the antichrist. If Obama really controlled all "his" media, that should have gone a lot better...
The propaganda "machines" in Nazi-Germany, soviet union, and today in Russia or North Korea differ in one important point from western media reporting: The government's narrative is the only narrative.