Back in the year 1948, there was a man by the name of Frank Wisner. For some time, he worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, and back in the year 1948, he was in charge of a branch of the CIA that was known as the Office of Policy Coordination and was given a lot of authority to do things that would help to 'protect American ideology'. Thus, the man began Operation Mockingbird. What was this particular operation about? Well, while the CIA is normally only supposed to do things related to activity outside of the country of the United States and not mess with the internal affairs of the country, this project was a major exception to that rule.
During the time of the Kennedy presidency, the CIA was given the go-ahead to wiretap and eavesdrop on the communication of major journalists while infiltrating major American news agencies. During the operation in the mid-1950s, the CIA had many plants working for them as 'journalists' and according to one operative, the process of getting journalists under their thumb was actually incredibly simple: "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."
The CIA was able to infiltrate major news sources like the Associated Press and The New York Times, allowing the CIA a decent amount of control over what stories would be published and which stories wouldn't. The CIA also harassed journalists who would not play ball, as mentioned in a quote from the "Family Jewels" CIA Management Committee Report:
Project Mockingbird, a telephone intercept activity, was conducted between 12 March 1963 and 15 June 1963, and targeted two Washington based newsmen who, at the time, had been publishing news articles based on, and frequently quoting, classified materials of this Agency and others, including Top Secret and Special Intelligence.