My first dev job out of college was in 2012 at a small media agency. We had some bigger clients, but we also still managed some super basic websites for local doctors, lawyers, etc that were some of our first clients when we the company was just starting up.
One day the CEO comes in and says, "We need someone to work with another company to make some changes to one of the websites and this is urgent". Since I was new and it was just text changes I got assigned the task.
Basically, one of the plastic surgeons who's site we managed was being sued for malpractice, and it was high profile enough that it made some local news websites. This surgeon hired a "reputation management" company to do pretty much what was explained in this article.
My job was basically to get on a call with this company and make the changes they requested, which was basically taking lines from the articles and working them into the surgeons website. So if a news article's said "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon is accused of malpractice" we would go through his website and change text from "Dr Bloblaw" to "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon" where ever we could. Additionally, they requested that I hide "Dr Bloblaw malpractice" and similar terms in small white text all over every page and some other black hat SEO shit. I'm sure there was more to it, since I took 3 or 4 calls with them spread out over a month, but I can't remember more details.
I'm long gone from that company and I'm sure those techniques don't work anymore, but yeah, in one form or another this type of reputation management is probably as old as SEO.
(Names and locations are changed)