Quote Originally Posted by Baloo View Post
How were these produced? At a company I worked for we sponsored advertorials and guy we wrote them ourselves sometimes, with the publisher editing. Other times we’d send them a brief outlining the message we wanted to convey and they’d write it and we’d edit. Either way they were essentially adverts for our company/products dressed-up as editorial.

It could be that’s not what has taken place here in fairness but I thought this was maybe being implied, rather than this being independently produced content just sponsored by the government. Hence the headline.

Did Private Eye clarify that point as it makes a bit of a difference about how would be perceived (acknowledging the broader point that regardless only selected publications have benefited from this advertising fund anyway).
I take your point but Private Eye didn't deal with the specifics that you mention, their angle was that the campaign was set up with the claimed intention of helping the beleaguered newspaper industry but the Cardiff Uni research showed that the network of independent local news publishers, which make up over a third of the total, haven't received a penny between them and that 95% of them hadn't been able to access any coronavirus-related funding, despite government advice to the contrary. They pretty much let the facts speak for themselves and the reader could look between the lines to decide exactly what the government is up to here. If there's a wider issue they'll unearth it, I'd prefer that to jumping in feet first with a conspiracy theory.

It looks like Jack Peat saw the recent articles in the Sun and Mail and was confident enough to assert that the government were directly paying those papers to say positive things about them, giving the impression that the reader would be unaware of it, in a similar way to what China has allegedly been doing with the Telegraph. The caveat 'appears' turned up by word three though, the articles he talked about were by-lined 'sponsored by the government', he was using the week old Private Eye article as his main point of reference and then finished it by pretty much asking 'why would the government bother paying the Sun and Mail to say positive stuff about them?' which is a good question and one he might have been better off trying to answer himself. It would be a bit like City paying DML to put positive stuff about them on here.