Furthermore, the FTC should indeed demand that online ads be treated the same as reality-like television & print ads - labeled with the same "This is a paid advertisement" legalese that appears in their subtitles and subscripts, respectively.

Of course, the real issue is that people are ignoring the review lessons Consumer Reports learned decades back - acquire everything with your own funding, and review nothing in a vacuum - everything is reviewed in comparison with similar products.

Re: Comic-Con--I'm pretty certain that no moderator is paid to attend Comic-Con. Press do get passes to it for free, like they attend numerous other conventions, expos, sporting event, etc., for free if they're covering them. News orgs pay for travel, lodging, etc., for reporters on assignment, so I don't know that getting into the event creates a sense of indebtedness (since your employer would otherwise pick up the tab anyway).

As for making friends: yeah, that's a hazard of a lot of journalistic beats. (I tend to be more on the side of keeping distance, but that's easier for me because I'm an unlikeable bastard anyway.) I would think you'd want to disclose that, which it seems the critic you refer to does--that is, I assume, how you know about it.

Anyway, overall, you're absolutely right: "mainstream," "traditional," "full-time" journalism is full of conflicts; I would never want to claim that it's not. (I have to write about HBO and TNT shows even though they're owned by the same company as TIME; I've blogged about Morning Joe's Starbucks product placement, etc.) I don't want to make this the righteous, principled professionals versus those wicked bloggers, because that's not what it is at all.

One critic whom you link to writes so obsessively about Comic-Con, weeks before it's set to commence, that by reading her work you'd think that was the *ONLY* thing that's been happening in the TV world the past month and a half. And she's moderating a panel and presumably attending Comic-Con for free. Is she essentially getting compensated to be a public relations shill for Comic-Con? It's hard to tell these days.

Another critic that you link to is good friends with several TV actors and TV creators and TV personalites. He even brags about being in the same fantasy league with them. So what happens when he has to write a review of their work (which he has)?

I understand that TV critics sometimes have to wear the reporter hat, too, but shouldn't there be some kind of professional.

My point is that well-regarded TV critics aren't always ethically in the clear.

This issue came up about a year ago on Ctrl-Alt-Del when I realized that the author, who writes comics and blogs about various video game stuff, was being paid to sing the praises of some fancy bean bag. At first, I thought he just really liked them and I was like, "Huh, they sound kinda cool." Then when he began to laud the company in earnest and (at great length), I realized it was obviously a product placement instead of a user review. This meant that I couldn't ever trust anything he said about a product ever again, and thus have never read a word he's typed since. I used to care what he thought and it influenced some purchases of mine. That's all done now. Pretty sure I'd feel that way about anyone writing 'positively incentivized content.'

Or, another hypothetical: say I were totally free to write a positive or negative review of HawthoRNe. But if I wrote a POSITIVE review, Lifetime would also send me $100.

But I would totally have given a thumbs up review in exchange for a bottle of HawthoRNe Vicodin.