The 'They influence the media' scheme is a fear based scheme. The fear you work with is the fear of the tax slaves of being indoctrinated, brain washed and living in a make believe world. It lives inside of them as can be seen from the success of movies like 'The Matrix'. This is not surprising as tax slaves are indeed indoctrinated and brain washed in your public education system. Your media takes care they live in a make belief world. Compulsory education should be inflicted sufficiently young to the tax slaves, to keep them unaware of what is going on. 

Instead of pointing out the real make belief world you have created for them, you use their unconscious awareness of this to point at evil companies trying to dump their crappy products on them with advertising, with prices too high or quality too low.

You can even accuse companies of promoting crappy products with advertising, while forcing your own crappy services upon them through violence. This works because they are unconscious of who is ripping them of. This only works when you start your indoctrination young. This has been proven again and again through history and all religious leaders are aware of this: get them while they are young.

While you accuse companies of trying to influence the media, you have the media in your grip through licensing and regulation and claim this is required to prevent companies from being able to have too much influence.

Questions to avoid

-Why should I be more fearful of their grip with words than of your grip with guns?

This person is not sufficiently drowned in fear to come up with an objection like that. Always claim that this is the case because the owners of companies have a profit motive and you do not. This is in itself a piece of advertising, which no sane person would belief under normal circumstances, let a lone given a situation in which you take more than half his income while saying you do not care about money. Nevertheless it works. Remember fear shuts down rational thinking and beliefs take over that you implanted in them when they were young.