[bqrkysqw] Manipulating the press

A female game developer allegedly tries to manipulate the press and all hell breaks loose.  Uber allegedly tries to manipulate the press and all hell breaks loose.

The common thread is the parties feeling it worth it to attempt to manipulate the press.  This suggests a failure within the journalism institution itself.  In order to maintain credibility, one would expect journalistic institutions to have developed powerful mechanisms to avoid manipulation.  And the market rewards discovering and publicizing if a journalistic competitor is being manipulated by whom and why and how.  These forces should be making it so difficult to manipulate the press that no one should even be trying.

The one exception is government: a government has so much power that no private journalistic institution would be able to resist government manipulation, which is why we have explicit freedom of the press.

Counterpoint: maybe readers don't care about the credibility of their journalism much, regarding journalism not as a source of truth but entertainment.  In which case we would not expect journalistic institutions to have deployed powerful mechanism to avoid manipulation.