Most aid-receiving governments are quite actively engaged with media - some in a good way, and some in a not so good way. It is because they, like all governments, are acutely aware of media's importance that they deploy an entire media-management apparatus of information ministries, state broadcasters, news services, advertising offices, direct and indirect payments to reporters and their employers, and myriad other methods of coercion and suasion and co-optation to influence news coverage. They care about media, deeply. And they invest in it, directly and indirectly.

The U.S. government may be most conspicuous in this regard, having devoted hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years to media created for its own policy ends, like Radio Sawa and Radio Marti, much as in the Cold War era with Radio Free Europe. Yet all five permanent members of the Security Council have long underwritten short-wave broadcasts from their information services in multiple languages to every village on the planet. And when the Security Council authorizes peacekeeping interventions, one of the first things the peacekeepers usually do is set up a UN radio service, building entire national transmission networks and news departments from scratch.