Hacker News Reader

Comment by iso947 | Hacker News Reader

The concept is nothing new, PR firms have been providing packed content for news consumption for years, and news organisations with ever decreasing budgets and time simply use them verbatim.

I’m sure there are criticisms about specific points, there always are, but I was aghast reading Flat Earth News a decade ago. I encourage everyone to pick up a copy for £3 on kindle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Davies#Critical_reaction_...

View on HN

This is correct. Had a friend in PR who did this sort of thing. They have money and time, and local news stations do not.

It's probably not so bad when the piece is on the wonders of asparagus and why you should eat more.

It is that bad (imo), unless it's clearly stated that it's a paid advertisement (that's what PR is), then you cannot trust your news source.

But it’s not a paid advertisement. It’s a corporate blog post published to an RSS feed for journalists to do with as they please.

It’s worse than a paid advertisement because news orgs are running it for free and doing absolutely nothing novel or critical with it.

Their not paying for it? That doesn't seem right.

This dark pattern is particular bad when extended to critical things, like national politics. Political think-tanks did a mass campaign like this to build the narrative for the Iraq War.

Heritage Foundation is one of the really bad actors here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com