Transparent Attempts at Negative Publicity

I was wondering if the transparent attempts at negative publicity by established interested is effective. I keep seeing but when I see the effect on me is to be surprised that anyone would think that the motivation is not obvious and self serving. I recently saw a story about AirBnb. They described how some users had their home trashed or were murdered. I am sure that happened but problems like that happen without AirBnb. There was a story about Uber where an Uber driver raped someone. Uber does not cause people to rape other people. Why was the story not about the brand of car that the Uber drive was in linked to the rape. Why was the city not linked to the rape. Random association between things and events is not significant unless there is a statistical study about the probabilities of the events occuring in specific circumstances. Does this work on people? I become irritated because the story becomes uninteresting due to the underlying attempt at manipulation. My time was wasted.