Chuck,

Any company "manages" press, with varying degrees of grossness. Studios, to choose one completely hypothetical example that has nothing to do with any past or present employers, are very conscious and manipulative in terms of both the business and the entertainment coverage of their projects. Some completely hypothetical examples that I have no personal knowledge of might include:

*Rushing a press release to the wires to avoid letting one venue scoop others (and thus pissing off other venues who might think the information had been deliberately leaked).
*Carefully giving leaks and exclusives to particular journalists to ensure initial coverage of a particular business development is positive (and yes, this goes as far as "put this spin on it and you can have this information on-the-record before anyone else" in so many words).
*Being incredibly careful to keep--again, speaking completely hypothetically--Nikki Finke and the rest of the Deadline crew feeling loved, lest they start running negative stories (which they've spiked in exchange for leaked information, hypothetically).
*Asking editors to steer assignments to particular freelancers or staff reporters who are known to be, let's say, "friendly" to the company (or away from others). Denying any of the editor's employees access or quotes or anything else if they don't do this.
*Putting together complete media packages with "friendly" editors and reporters. Hypothetically.

I'm not going to footnote any of those hypothetical examples in public, but let's just say I find it very hard to believe that a company Apple's size doesn't do exactly as much of that as they can get away with. They can get away with less of it with some venues than others. (They get away with some of it everywhere.)

Note that I'm not talking about arts coverage there, just hard news coverage of the business. Not talking about subjective news. It is true, however, that they do as much as they can to manage "subjective" news, as well. The only thing that stops them from asking particular critics to be assigned to particular films is written policies that the editors can point to and say, well, my hands are tied, sorry. As far as whether or not journalists should attend industry parties, well, what does David Pogue do? He's allowed to eat the food or have drinks at receptions if he's covering the event. He's not allowed to accept free travel or lodging. (Joystiq could have complied with even the Times' more restrictive policy by simply paying for the room themselves, if the developer insisted that was the only place the game could be played.)

And while the one piece I linked to is obviously a press release (and Deadline is the most shameless about this), you wouldn't necessarily be able to see the film studio's influence in a lot of stories that, in fact, were quite carefully stage managed, entirely to serve the bottom line. It's their job. Their interests might be aligned with AICN, and an individual PR person might love a movie or client or whatever just as much as a reporter, but yes, I do think that all of their decisions are about the bottom line. If they're not, they're not doing their job. If that wasn't true at Telltale, they should hire better publicists.

We don't disagree as much about Daisy as you seem to think. Daisy didn't have to lie, and shouldn't have lied. (I do have a different expectation for what I see in a theater--if I'd seen his show live, I would have expected some stretching of the truth, as I would from any storyteller. We might disagree there, but do you really think everything Mike Birbiglia says on stage could be sourced and verified?) If he'd rewritten to be accurate for This American Life, I think he would have done just fine. As it is, we agree that he did more harm than good, in that he's sort of a Climategate that lets people like Gruber keep their fingers in their ears.

Apple, incidentally, could have started caring about the conditions at Foxconn and other suppliers at any point since Tim Cook began his outsourcing strategy at the start of the last decade. Instead, they carefully managed the suppliers' minuscule profit margins while growing their own, and deliberately moved manufacturing to countries with abysmal labor laws. I mean, give me a fucking break--to paraphrase a discredited liar, do you really think they didn't know? You really think that "altruism" had anything to do with their decision to implement minimal standards for suppliers? Why did they outsource to begin with, to make Tom Friedman happy? You think the Foxconn raises were because of "altruism?" What took them so long to get altruistic? Altruism doesn't enter into it; it honestly doesn't have any place in business. The absolute best spin you can put on this is that they were like FDR: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."

Here's the crazy thing about all of this, though, to get back to journalism. Not only is AICN the poster-boy for why publications shouldn't let their journalists accept travel, accomodations, gifts, and so on, and the most obvious example of how completely a studio will capture a journalist if given the opportunity, he's also pretty explicitly on the same side as Jason Schreier when it comes to the fans' right to know everything, which will somehow magically result in great movies. See, e.g, here and here.

As always, more to say on this topic, but this seems like a good start.