How corporations use advertisements to influence how the media reports on their activities. Prime example is how BP ran all those "We're Sorry" ads when they poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. They weren't apologizing to the public. They were using the ads to pass bribes to the news agencies to make sure to give them soft coverage when they should have been ranking them over the coals.
Sorry for my difficult to discern tone. Oops! Receipt talk-
My tabs from last night:
My comment two weeks ago:
The BP bribe theory is terribly cunning and nobody else talking about it came up in the first few DuckDuckGo/Google results. Never heard anybody mention it in 2010 either.
Edit: I guess the point would be discussions on the topic may not mention each individual case of bribery because the practice is pervasive.
Yes. That's how you bribe news agencies with plausible deniability. It's so well understood within the industry, that you wont find explicit instructions on any of the contracts.