In what way is this different from the activities of newspapers and magazines in the previous 300 years?
Exactly, been going on for awhile. If you are a good PR hack you write a press release that doesn't sound releasey. With luck, you get a lazy reporter/editor that runs it as is and calls it news. Now relace that luck with a little money. All the big circ periodicals have those sponsored content sections nowadays, they slowly look less and less like adspace and more like nooz.
