When people think about the relationship between media owners and advertisers, and how this has evolved down the decades, they assume that this is a marriage based on mutual suspicion.
Arguably, this goes right back to the Victorian era, when newspapers were sensitive to accusations that their editorial integrity could be bought by commercial or political interests. That’s how the media owner notion of “church and state” was born – structures to keep advertisers and their commercial ideas well away from high-minded content creators.
The situation was even starker in the British broadcasting sector, monopolised as it was up until...