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Advertising is any non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, and services, usually... more Advertising is any non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, and services, usually paid for by an individual sponsor (Dominic, 2005). Advertising serves four basic functions in society: Serves marketing function by helping companies that provide products or services sell their products. Second, it is educational. Through advertising, people learn about products and services, or improvements in existing ones. Third, it plays an economic role. Advertising enables new products to enter the market. Finally, it performs a definite social function.

Public relations process as “planned, persuasive communication designed to influence significant ... more Public relations process as “planned, persuasive communication designed to influence significant publics.” It can also be defined as a system of communication to create goodwill, exert influence on public opinion.
The role of public relations is critically important in crisis situations, for two reasons: First, because public relations monitor public opinion, practitioners can represent the public interest and predict public reaction to institutional decisions.
Second, public relations communicate organizational decisions to the public.
A public is a group of people who share a common problem or goal and recognize their common interest. A primary aim of public relation is to sensitise the organization to public images and expectations (Basin, 1997).
Special events include news conferences, conventions, exhibitions and showings, anniversary, celebrations, contests and awards are only a few of the events used to gain attention and acceptance of groups of people.
They involve careful planning and co-ordination, attention to detail, preparation of special booklets, publicity, and reports.
These activities create photo and story opportunities for media. PR prospers under adverse circumstances-when power is threatened or when public support is needed. It also flourishes most in times of extreme pressure or crisis.
PR, acting during these periods, employs symbols that are easily identifiable and arouse emotions. PR practitioners often keep three major persuasion objectives in mid when they are developing their strategies: maintain favourable opinion; create opinion where none exists or where it is latent; and neutralise hostile opinion.

Media ownership will continue to present numerous challenges to editorial independence. Commercia... more Media ownership will continue to present numerous challenges to editorial independence. Commercialisation, deregulation, internationalisation, media concentration, convergence and other profit-oriented trends are likely to widen the gap between what can be called the political logic and the media logic. All these trends contribute to the strengthening of the power of big corporate media and enable them to distance themselves from democratic power structures. It is most likely that those trend‐setting mass media become less interested in comprehensive information on policy processes and democracy. By this development, private commercial and international mass media organizations erode their relevance to the society that they are expected to serve. Thereby, a window of opportunity opens for public service media that are less exposed to these trends than private commercial mass media. Consequently, the relevance of public service media for the democratic process and the policy discourse increases.
But there seems to be a silent but irreversible shift towards larger and more commercial media empires with increasing economic and even political clout. It is important to note that democratic societies require timely and relevant information, interest mediation and control. On the other Hand, mass media are obligated to contribute to these fundamental principles of democracy.
Unfortunately, the larger and more commercial corporate media become, the less they are interested to enable and fulfill these essential democratic requirements. As Trappel (2008) puts, “democratic policy making requires specific forms of media coverage that is not offered by commercial transnational corporate media. Public service media are well placed to fill this important vacancy”.
The media owner, in most cases, will strive to use media to project certain positions which protect their interests and generate more revenue while the editor will struggle to remain free from any stranglehold. Commercial media have to make profit to survive, and this often involves taking decisions which directly influence content such as cutting costs, closing down non-profit making media ventures, laying off staff, investing or not, and merging operations. Advertisers, regulators, business forces among other forces have continued to gang up to mould the media entities to become corporations.
The society’s elite end up being media owners and consequently manipulate or control what comes out of their media empires and the adage ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’ manifests itself in media ownership and editorial content. Consequently, media’s role as society’s watchdog is exchanged for that of wagging dog.
This paper will attempt to provide a roadmap to this challenge by reviewing what other scholars have done and connecting the same with theories that anchor the same arguments.