This kind of thing has been going on forever, and doesn’t require a massive conspiracy. Google buys an ad campaign, one of the journalists publishes a fluff piece or drops a negative piece. I remember Matthew Wright talking about why he left the Daily Mirror over a Pizza Hut article.
A recent alleged example I can think of is Sharon Waxman, former NYT reporter who founded and runs The Wrap, claiming the paper was pressured to give up her 2004 investigation into Weinstein [0]:
> After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.
> I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.
However, this to me is another example of why the details of the conspiracy are important. First, the NYT editors involved deny her allegations:
Of course, that's the kind of denial you would expect from editors trying to cover their own asses. But the strongest evidence that Waxman may not have had anything akin to what the NYT won a Pulitzer this year for reporting is Waxman's own article:
It's a pretty lengthy article for what feels like insider baseball involving a little known entertainment official ("Miramax Sues Ex-Chief in Italy, Saying He Had 2 Jobs"), one that required her to spend time reporting in Italy, which is pretty good considering she was (in her own words) "a fairly new reporter" based in Los Angeles. The NYT is apparently ready to jump at Weinstein's word -- with that kind of familiarity/subservience toward Weinstein, how could editors even approve Waxman's proposed investigation (nevermind the travel expenses)?
The other thing against Waxman is the fact that she had ~8 years as the executive editor of her own Hollywood news site (The Wrap began in 2009) to pursue the investigation she claims was held. She did not. She appended an explanation to her initial article [0], in which she says "the moment had passed" because Miramax was mostly-defunct and she was too busy doing the work of raising money and running her own company. And also, Waxman writes, she did not hear of anything bad about Weinstein in the subsequent years and assumed he had reformed. It's possible had Waxman had more resources and faith from higher-ups, that she could've eventually uncovered the scandal. But it's clear she had nothing in 2004, or in the years since, that was a smoking gun about Weinstein's crimes -- she would not have sat on such a story otherwise.
I agree editorial scandal does not "require a massive conspiracy". David Simon famously alleged [1] (also known as the 5th season of "The Wire") that Baltimore Sun higher-ups looked the other way as a reporter published Pulitzer-bait fake stories. And there's of course the recent example of TMZ founder Harvey Levin's purported friendship with President Trump [2]. And there are numerous, more ambiguous cases in which an editor's/reporter's personal relationships may have influenced coverage [3] in subtle ways.
One of the most egregious examples -- in terms of obvious cause-and-effect of advertiser pressure, and the number of people involved -- is BuzzFeed's admission [4] it deleted several stories critical of advertisers because of advertisers' complaints to BuzzFeed's business team. But even in that egregious example, it's worth noting that it was exposed because BF felt compelled to do an internal investigation, which immediately got leaked to Gawker. And the examples of advertiser influence all involve ad-hoc deletions of articles that were outright critical. Even as influential as these advertisers were (and as flimsy as BF's editorial reputation was in 2015), advertisers still didn't have prior review, or other mechanisms to prevent bad press.
What's being alleged with The Evening Standard, by comparison, is a massive conspiracy. From the reporting in the submitted article, it sounds like there are meetings involving a good number of folks for ES's editorial and business side, as well as PR people from some of the most media savvy corporations. There's even a fancy PowerPoint presentation. I don't believe that corporations are above using their financial resources to bend journalism toward their ends. I just don't believe it would be done so unnecessarily out in the open and so brazenly.
