They are not inhibited, they are positively and negatively incentivized. To say that the government and high-level government officials are a powerful influence is hardly contentious.
If you talk shit about your boss (even if it is true and done politely) it will probably negatively affect you. If you support your boss you will probably reap rewards. The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does.
I'm not sure this is really responsive to my point: I gave a specific example of a bombshell story the NYT ran that was arguably more harmful to "national security" than any revelation about spying on Barack Obama.
In that case you are going to have to make your point explicit. My understanding is that you are trying to say that the media outlets are not influenced by the government because there exist significant critical stories of the government.
But as I said "The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does."
I guess I'm just asking why today's story, about NSA spying on Obama, which is viscerally more interesting than the Risen story but less impactful to national security, would be "frozen out" of the mainstream media where Risen's story clearly wasn't.
If you talk shit about your boss (even if it is true and done politely) it will probably negatively affect you. If you support your boss you will probably reap rewards. The result is a system where people are influenced not to criticise their boss not a system where no one ever does.