Yes Google (and many others) massage the media landscape for favourable news. This has been going on for many years now. After all, Google is a company speciali

Yes Google (and many others) massage the media landscape for favourable news. This has been going on for many years now. After all, Google is a company specializing in influencing public opinion. Though "sponsored content" (hidden ads) are required by policy or even law to be marked as such. At least the (incredibly uninspired) Google image brochure in this week's Spiegel (large German politics weekly similar to Newsweek and Time magazine) was. Time to recheck IT trends/fads as well. Think about IT coverage in this decade, or even before that: cloud (kubernetes being portrayed as the best thing since sliced bread), web frameworks (where React seems to have won this round of publicity warfare though since Fakebook is also a media powerhouse), the vulgar "HTML5 rocks" campaign to take HTML standards away from W3C for better or worse (so that browsers can have things such as geolocation, and for Chrome dominance), making it appear a grassroots effort, staged questions/answers on StackOverflow, voting rings to hide dissenting opinions, ...