It depends on what you mean by planted. For "some Apple PR person called or e-mailed" then, yes, the chance is non-zero. That's part of how journalism works. A story that's both true and interesting should be published, and it also benefitting some company should have as little impact as when it hurts that company, i. e. none.
If you're talking about a Seattle Times journalist or editor literally being bribed into running the story, you've gone off the deep end. Any such attempt by Apple would give some journalist a once-in-a-lifetime chance to expose a major scandal. It would expose Apple, and any journalist and their publications to risks far larger than whatever the value of a positive, but rather minor, story in a second-tier US newspaper is worth, etc.
"question everything" is stupid advise. Do you question if water isn't a deadly poison every time you drink it? Do you verify your spouse's DNA every time you see them, to prevent them being replaced by imposters?
Of course not, because it's impossible (also insane). Try establishing the usefulness of, say, vaccines from first principle: it would require running hundreds of clinical trials, all by yourself (don't trust anyone!), at costs in the billions of dollars, and taking far longer than your life.
And remember that you will also somehow need to convince yourself of the power of whatever statistics you use in those trials. You need to redo everything, all the way back to, at best, "parallel lines don't intersect". Because that Pythagoras wasn't even considered trustworthy by his compatriots, so why should you?
Realistically, you, like everyone, make thousands of decisions every day and need heuristics to get anything done. Most often, those heuristics involve some system of establishing trust by, for example, remembering previous interactions with people or newspapers or other institutions. It just so happens that you think you come across more interesting on the internet by pretending (or actually) trusting a different set of sources than society at large, i. e. conspiracy theorists pseudonymously ranting about the "mainstream media", instead of that media.
If you're talking about a Seattle Times journalist or editor literally being bribed into running the story, you've gone off the deep end. Any such attempt by Apple would give some journalist a once-in-a-lifetime chance to expose a major scandal. It would expose Apple, and any journalist and their publications to risks far larger than whatever the value of a positive, but rather minor, story in a second-tier US newspaper is worth, etc.
"question everything" is stupid advise. Do you question if water isn't a deadly poison every time you drink it? Do you verify your spouse's DNA every time you see them, to prevent them being replaced by imposters?
Of course not, because it's impossible (also insane). Try establishing the usefulness of, say, vaccines from first principle: it would require running hundreds of clinical trials, all by yourself (don't trust anyone!), at costs in the billions of dollars, and taking far longer than your life.
And remember that you will also somehow need to convince yourself of the power of whatever statistics you use in those trials. You need to redo everything, all the way back to, at best, "parallel lines don't intersect". Because that Pythagoras wasn't even considered trustworthy by his compatriots, so why should you?
Realistically, you, like everyone, make thousands of decisions every day and need heuristics to get anything done. Most often, those heuristics involve some system of establishing trust by, for example, remembering previous interactions with people or newspapers or other institutions. It just so happens that you think you come across more interesting on the internet by pretending (or actually) trusting a different set of sources than society at large, i. e. conspiracy theorists pseudonymously ranting about the "mainstream media", instead of that media.