Edit: after typing all of this, I re-read your comment and realized I simply argued your point for you further. Initially misread.
luckily it's not very subtle and rarely hard to spot.
The abrasive propaganda that's easy to spot, sure. But I'm positive that's a minority of if unless you're hyper vigilant in which case you're also going to have a ton of false positives.
Now to preface this next bit. I don't categorize myself politically. I'm very open to many different viewpoints but I saw Trump winning as a very dangerous thing, so some people would call me liberal, although plenty of liberals have called me a conservative in the past. I'm pro-choice, but I can understand that many really do see it as murder. I've had insults from all across the spectrum accusing me of fitting nicely into a box.
The first example of a western media type of propaganda that comes to mind in America-centric media is how the COVID lab leak theory was so heavily associated and linked with the far-right and discredited that even when the Department of Energy (they handle nuclear secrecy and many other things) and other official agencies released their assessments earlier this year that said the lab leak theory is the most likely by far, few seemed to believe it and not many news networks reported on it longer than a day, if that. And, since scientists work in provable facts and China hid the initial infections for over a month, even though they studied all the data and said it's the most likely theory, they said they had "low confidence" in that assessment, because you can't go back into the past and investigate things that are now covered up. Many if not most virologists who specialize in coronaviruses extensively now say that coronavirus jumping from an animal to a human with the highly-contagious specific modifications it had for binding to the specific receptor say it's highly unlikely that it occured naturally in the wild. We (including American and other western scientists) went searching in caves and forests for many months for any mammals that had a previous version of the specific mutation that led to COVID-19 before it jumped to humans. No animal coronavirus with that precursor mutation has ever been found.
We now know that at least 3 people who were working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology where gain-of-function research was being done (in a level 2 lab -- only medium security, if I recall correctly - think gloves, masks, change of outfit... no serious sanitization) were hospitalized for COVID symptoms a month before the first infected masses started showing up to hospitals with covid symptoms. The 3 scientists tested negative for everything they tested them for.
But the majority of people will still tell you it was caused by a wet market infected animal, and if you bring up the evidence and official opinion that it was a lab leak they will fight you on it and make up excuses.
Whether it's a case of political bias, or self-censorship for fear of repercussions of subscriber numbers, or a message came from the top of the networks, it was a very effective campaign of propaganda. Even though it would be beneficial for the "China is incompetent, and dangerous, and we need to spend as much as we can to protect ourselves from them" narrative the DoD has been pushing (true as it may (or may not, I'm not an expert in geopolitics) - the majority of major news networks decided to brush it under the rug.
Took me a second. If I was still a smoker, it may have taken me a minute.