That said, this is exactly what happens when, as a journalist, you start to blur the lines. As a reader it's hard to feel any sympathy when reading paragraphs that try just a bit too hard to rationalize the behavior:
Again, a reminder – Behavior such as Samsung’s is not uncommon in the world of tech coverage. It’s perhaps considered more normal in some parts of the world
Not to mention your remark about being stranded in Berlin not being so bad.
I don't think that ever really worked out.
If the allegations are true, Samsung acted reprehensibly but these guys were naive.
on the one hand, being subtly 'encouraged' to write favorable blog posts or reviews via enjoyable junkets, and
on the other hand, being expected to act as a real part of the PR team, wear company-branded clothing, and film promotional videos.
One is normal practice in tech journalism. The other is something quite different, and more aggressive. It seems like the bloggers expected the former - not especially naively - and got the latter via pressure and bait-and-switch.
Ethical companies understand that and accept the risk anyway, because getting good journalists with reach to even think of your brand and see your devices in the metal in the right circumstances is much more difficult than you'd think. So they put aside a relatively minuscule part of their marketing budget to wine, dine & sometimes fly journalists to these events.
If you look for it, you can often see this being disclosed by the relevant journalist at the end of their article, depending on their publication's ethics rules. For instance NYT journalists like Mossberg and Pogue will mention when a new Apple gizmo they're reviewing was shown to them personally by Apple before the public unveiling.
I have insight into this because a number of my friends are journalists across a few different industries. One in particular (not in the tech industry) was just recently flown to an event in Europe along similar lines, with the only requirement being that he was asked to attend all the particular company's press briefings there in return.
Samsung's behaviour in this case is unethical, to blame the bloggers for any of this when it's clear that they did their best to clarify the arrangement is unfair.
Thats not the modus operandi nowadays. Good old prussian censors have proven ineffective; they cause too much political fallout and instability for what they can offer. Instead, you hire PR people to spin a story. You stop inviting journalists that write critically of you to events. You stop giving them interviews. You don't give them leads on stories that could benefit you when published. You don't give them the infamous "well informed insider" quotes.
But a journalists' livelihood is directly connected to his ability to write interesting news and reports. In some places where politics and journalism are (physically) so close and dense, like Berlin, you eventually realize that you have to keep a healthy social relationship with the very people you are supposed to investigate, simply to keep, to do your job.
How do some papers get a reputation for being left leaning (or right, or environmental, or..)? No one puts bias in writing. Journalists just already know what is expected of them. Self-censorship.
(Sorry, this has slipped into some kind of rant. I'm just not very interested in the "look what Samsung did" brouhaha, but the forces at work here)
And Berlin is a fabulous city to get stranded in. It's not like it was Slough (UK) or Detroit (USA) or Grozny (RU)...
Right. I suppose Samsung could have dropped them off in the middle of the Atlantic during a major storm without even a liferaft.
In other words: Is that really the conversational tactic you want to apply here?