This is a convoluted question, but I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you have off the dome. 1) I understand that the corporate news media are fully captured by capitalist interests and the national security state. Major news outlets are not going to call for de-militarizing the globe, overthrowing the system, and redistributing the wealth. 2) Meanwhile, political scientist and inveterate pessimist Jodi Dean argues that politics happens on two registers: The first is merely a circulation of discourse and communication that creates the illusion of participatory democracy. (In her mind, we would all be stuck on this level, posting and browsing twitter, etc.). The second is the actual policy that the US government follows, which doesn't give a damn about what people in the first register say. One of her examples is the largest antiwar protest ever amassed (in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq War), which had zero impact on Bush's actions. Given all this: Would you say that the news media don't have the capacity to destroy powerful people's careers and change anything for the better? One, because they're in thrall to capital and the power elite, and two, because they're outside the register of official politics anyway? And if this is the case, do powerful individuals simply know all this, never fearing consequences from bad press? (I guess that would be class consciousness at work).
while the capitalist class probably does not fear corporate media broadly, capital formations within the class come after each others territory constantly in contest for profit extraction and the media is often a vehicle of that contest. so, i would say the news media as it exists has the capacity to destroy powerful people's lives, but not change anything for the better.
if a large news organization were to "go rogue" and widely platform insurrectionary politics, decolonization, mass actions, etc, the capitalist class would collude to destroy it or at the very least, marginalize it to a relative non-existence.