Are there many, or even any, examples of that? If so I'd like to see one.

Really, all we care about is having the best article on a topic, where by 'best' I mean something like 'most substantive, while remaining accessible to a general audience'. By that standard it seemed obvious that the Reuters url was better. Anti-Apple bias doesn't enter into it, and frankly the idea feels a little absurd to me.

dang, every time there's a story about Google, admins here link to official Google blogs. Every time it hits the front page. And if thee's a negative story about Google, it's quickly buried/flagged/disappeared.

I'm sorry, but that's an absurd thing to claim. All I can really take from what you've said there is that you dislike Google.

For any $bigco there are lots of HN users who strongly feel for or against it, and they all have competing beliefs about which $bigco is secretly favored or secretly suppressed here.

People come up with highly charged claims about HN all the time and they're never true. They're in the eye of the beholder, reflecting how you feel, not how HN actually is, and driven by cognitive bias. I don't mean to criticize you personally—tons of HN readers do it, and I've written about the phenomenon a lot. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...