Investigative journalism is getting a new name: blogs

I visited my parents last weekend and spent some time watching a segment on a local tv station online titled “Does it work?” The show’s purpose was to take products shown in infomercials and to test them to see if the claims made about the product was actually true. Some of the products worked, some did not. One of my first questions about the show was if the makers of the products or the public relations firms that represented the products had had a hand in determining which products worked and which didn’t. In other words, did the companies represented on the news show use their advertising dollars as a way to manipulate the outcome of the product, whether positively or negatively?