You are looking at things in a vacumn and that's what preventing you from seeing the point here. When a gov actively bribes media it's not "just" an act of brib

You are looking at things in a vacumn and that's what preventing you from seeing the point here. When a gov actively bribes media it's not "just" an act of bribing that could or couldn't have happened. It implies pre-existing relationships between gov and media. It implies allignment of interests between gov and media. It implies will to comply to yhe gov. It implies future bonding between gov and media. Technically, the media are still "free". But we don't really care about the freedom of media to allign with the status quo. We care about the opposite. The reason media is useful and thr reason we care for oppression of the press is because we want media that can report against the gov who may have potentially done something bad. In that context, in real life, bribery is an indirect form of control. It's an indirect form of restricting freedom