<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by letiole:
Quite often these are advertising sections and these so-called auto review writers work for the advertising department, not the editorial department. It's the same thing with real estate sections. In these cases you're really reading ads.
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That's right-on, too. There has been an increasing trend over the last several years in which advertising copy is generated to look like the regular text of the newspaper itself. In addition, a lot of mid- to large-sized papers have their own auto writers -- these were the guys I was talking about. Simply ridiculous some of the stuff that used to (and still does) go on with that. But the "article advertisement" is another worrisome thing because very often it is layed out identically to the paper's usual format, in the same fonts, and with only a small, ten-point "Advertisement" printed at the top.