As a professional who has spent more than 20 years in the news business including more than a few of those at major national news organizations I have to tell you that all these conspiracy theories about what goes on in new orgs are complete bunk. It's a bunch of people trying to do their best to tell the stories they believe are important for the people to know, and trying hard to get it right and get to the bottom of the stories. Of course it's a human enterprise so mistakes are made, commercial pressures are felt (especially in these days of free ad content, graying audiences for news and shrinking ad revenue), individuals have biases etc., and sometimes very bad things happen. And maybe its true that we journalists as a group have not done our best work over the last 15 years here in the US. But it's not the world of censorship, manipulation and b.s. that people too often think it is. I can't speak too much to the questions about the audiophile press. Trade and enthusiast publications -- where advertisers, sources and readers all tend to come from the same community -- face much more extreme, even sometimes existential ethical and financial pressures than general interest press as a result of that narrow, circular world in which they operate. And I'm not sure what codes of ethics they have in house -- certainly every major news organization I've ever worked for has had extensive, explicit, written and codified ethics guidelines -- and I know that often writers in audio mags come not from the world of journalism but are hobbyists from other walks of life. But still, as someone who has seen this practice from the inside for most of my adult life I gotta say, it's a lot less nefarious than many people seem to presume.
