What evidence do you have for this? It sounds like conspiracy thinking to me.
I've seen the term "submarine article" used to describe PR-encouraged articles. Practically, they're not "directing" news outlets but they are "informing" them in likely biased ways.
"Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month."
Wondering how much real estate bros are paying to promote the archaic, regressive, idea of working on site.
The idea that it’s not evidence of a lack of so called conspiracy thinking is not so obvious. It seems like there’s an industry that’s ready to exactly serve this purpose of spreading a story.
The article makes no such argument; it merely says that shifts in how people work may cause problems. Everyone wins if we try and anticipate problems and prevent them. No one is being manipulated and no one is pulling any strings here.
I can claim anyone and anything I don't like is being "directed", without evidence of course. Fact is, sometimes a change (a neutral change, or even a good change) can also cause unintended side-effects, and that's not a conspiracy.