The Propaganda machine.
This article
Media Matrix and General Reality (scroll to page 22) gives a very good perspective on the MSM propaganda machine. You need to have an understanding of these processes to have any hope of making sense of the forces at play. Although it is applied to trading, it is highly relevant to the Qantas situation.
He mentions three sources:
Propaganda: Edward Bernays - the father of the "pubic relations" industry.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media - YouTube