UPDATE: The Truth About Tech Central Station
When McDonald's wants to influence you, sometimes it doesn't want you to know that it's McDonald's doing the influencing. It would rather have you believe that its corporate message is actually the independent view of a publication that just happens to be pro-McDonald's. So rather than deliver its message honestly, under its own name, sometimes a corporation like McDonald's will secretly use an "independent" publication that allows it to pay a behind-the-scenes fee in exchange for transmitting its message, no questions asked.
Tech Central Station is one of these unethical publications. Published by a PR firm called DCI Group, and financed by a group of companies who pay to have its "journalists" conveniently adopt their chosen messages, Tech Central Station is essentially a front. The companies behind it know that you wouldn't accept these messages if you knew they were coming from their hired PR firms, so they try to fool you into thinking the messages come from what sounds like an independent outlet.
Most publications accept advertising, of course, so the possibility of a pro-sponsor bias is present almost everywhere in the media. But with Tech Central Station this influence is direct and certain: The companies pay money, TCS adopts their chosen message. Vigorously. And the connection, of course, is never mentioned in the "articles" that result from these transactions.
And it is all generally done to try to make you believe something that isn't true.
Nicholas Confessore investigated Tech Central Station and DCI Group for the Washington Monthly. An excerpt:
TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.
James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now.