Before Reddit was big, everyone was on Digg, and then Digg basically did the same thing by giving all the official MSM accounts priority access to the top of the feed without having to go through the gauntlet of new submissions. It was literally what caused everyone to leave Digg and move to Reddit. Now they are basically accepting the same exact thing the only difference is that instead of being directly pushed to the top by the Reddit, they are just allowing these posts to get the instant default 10k upvotes to push it up the feed.