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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.