Sometimes it’s important to give encouragement. So this week we’d like to give a supersized unWankley Award to Australia’s TV news for not yet accepting ad placement. Ad placement like this:  

There’s a reason they look so creepily perky.

Anchors on the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, KVVU, have started sitting “with cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on their desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of their morning show,” revealed The New York Times this week.

Executives at the station said that “the six-month promotion” would not influence content. But if a negative McD’s story came up, and the cups were not taken off the set, the fast food giant also noted it would terminate the contract without hesitation.

Hello slippery slope. Hello floodgates. Hello end of the beginning of the end.

On to matters Apple — no don’t write in, I’m not paying Apple out — and we wonder if the folks at The Sydney Morning Herald are miffed. After all those happy Apple stories about the iStore and then the iPhone, the company goes and plugs its Melbourne counterpart.

In its instructional vid for the iPhone, Apple uses The Age website to demonstrate how you can get the news.

No money changed hands for this boon, says Fairfax. In fact, Apple apparently requested to use The Age.

Crikey wonders: Is there more to this story? And, more importantly, does this make editor Andrew Jaspan cool?