I tend to think there's always been conspiracy in crafting media narratives but that it was once covert and is now overt. There are still plenty of Andrew Marrs around - people in senior positions in TV and other media because they profess to believe - and probably DO sincerely believe - the official orthodoxes of the day. But there's so much else going on - the revisionism surrounding the events of WW2, for example. Within a dozen years, the Nazis will be the good guys with the Soviet Union responsible for starting the war and all the atrocities that followed. The rehabilitation of Nazism and the general re-writing of history. The spinning of entirely false narratives; up is down, left is right, in is out etc, etc. None of this happens accidentally.