.."fill in the blank". Moneyed interests, govt interests, whoever was pulling the strings. Probably overlap, and I think it depended on the biases of the complainer. I have a close friend from college who at some point after we graduated became a Noam Chomsky devotee. Places him on the extreme left, and his complaint was always about the moneyed elite controlling information flow so much that we barely had a clue what was really going.

I don't know what he thinks now. But it's hard to stick by that concept as the problem nowadays. Now, the problem seems to be radical democratization of info flow, and unfortunately, the vast majority of us prefer to have our biases confirmed, not challenged. One would think that would be more true of less well educated folks, but I'm not sure it really is.