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In Reply to: RE: The ethics of accepting products for review with the promise of advertising. posted by Analog Scott on February 22, 2012 at 10:49:22
There exists no way to "navigate" this problem. When a magazine depends almost solely on adv. dollars to survive this publication ceases to be objective. Besides adv. dollars we also have problems with egos, long standing relationships and personal vendettas.
Follow Ups:
"When a magazine depends almost solely on adv. dollars to survive this publication ceases to be objective."
I think you're overlooking something, which is the shear number of revenue sources. When there are many, the impact of the loss of a few is reduced. No publisher likes to lose a client (or an individual subscriber), but the wiser among them know that will happen from time to time and not be fatal, especially if the revenue streams are broad enough. (Which you want them to be for business strength anyway, because advertisers and readers come and go for their own reasons all the time anyway.) It's certainly possible to hold on to your principles of editorial integrity even if it costs you an advertiser or reader on occasion.
Really?Let's use a real - world example. I wrote for Listener magazine for it's entire life span. I had no connection to the advertising sales person. I may have met her once at a party at Art Dudley's house but other than that I never spoke to her, ever. Art and I never discussed the magazine's ads, and I had no knowledge of what ads had been sold for upcoming issues or anything else to do with ads in Listener . Art never asked me to change a review in any way to make it more palatable to an advertiser. Given these facts, please explain exactly how the content of the reviews I wrote was rendered unreliable by the ads that were adjacent to those reviews.
Edits: 02/25/12
I have a friend who has been in publishing (not audio) as an editor and publisher for decades. He is an extremely bright guy, we were in high school at the same time and he got a perfect 1600 on his SATs. He laughs at the notion of an unbreachable firewall between advertising and journalism. His argument, and I think Gore Vidal made a similar one, is that there doesn't need to be any overt quid pro quo. The journalism staff, unless they are completely gormless, know who are the major advertisers and what kind of copy might adversely affect subscription rates. They have a seat at the table because they accept a tacit matrix of assumptions and perspective. It is wired into their subconscious and in the air they breathe.
Audio journalism tends to compound this tendency by virtue of the unusually high level of interaction between the reviewers and the companies producing the products under review. Factor in accommodation pricing, the occasional lunch or dinner, perhaps a trip to the factory, system set up help, other social interactions, etc. and claims that none of this, in any way, influences copy just doesn't pass the common sense test.
I'm not trying to make audio journalists out to be bad guys. I respect some members of the audio press and I think that most of them want to do a good job. I subscribed to HFN & RR, The Absolute Sound, Fi, Listener and several others and I still subscribe to Stereophile. I don't, however, believe in their unbiased objectivity any more than I believe in the tooth fairy.
Edits: 02/28/12
It's monstrously arrogant - insulting, in fact - for you and your invisible friend to presume to know what I was thinking when I wrote my reviews for Listener . The negative reviews my fellow Listener writers and I authored, and that Art published without any alteration save for grammatical corrections, prove that your silly theory is full of shit. To cite just one example, my review of a Pro Ac speaker not only caused the importer to cancel his ads but also ended his friendship with Art. I still get complaints about my pan of the Roksan Xerxes X that wasn't even published in this century.
> > The journalism staff...know...what kind of copy might adversely affect subscription rates. < <
So the other half of your silly theory is that critical reviews would somehow make subscription rates go up? How, exactly? Do you know even the basics of magazine economics? Let's take another real world example: Entertainment Weekly runs negative reviews of movies, TV shows, books, and music every week. By your illogic then an EW subscription should cost a fortune. Unfortunately for your silly theory, my subscription to EW costs less than 30 cents an issue. That's almost certainly less than it costs Time - Warner to print the thing and mail it to me. But how can that be if negative reviews drive up subscription prices?
> > Factor in accomodation pricing < <
Oh God, not that again.
Audio Asylum has been in existence for something like a decade and a half and in all that time not one person has ever been able to explain how the ability of reviewers to get a trade discount on gear leads to spurious reviews. Obviously, one concern is that poor components might get reviews they don't merit. The possibility of a discount provides no motivation for inflating the appraisal of a bad component! If the component is unimpressive then the reviewer won't have any interest in buying it. I guess you believe that the possibility of a discount on something the reviewer doesn't want to buy will somehow influence the review, as if the writer thinks "I don't want anything from this manufacturer so therefore I owe them a favor." That's just ridiculous. Humans simply don't behave like that. Consider the Xerxes X I referenced above. I didn't care that I could have bought it at wholesale, I didn't like the sound of it. I wouldn't have wanted it in my system even if Roksan gave it to me gratis. How was my bad opinion of the turntable affected by accomodation pricing? It certainly didn't earn Roksan a positive review. Conversely, how does accomodation pricing affect the review of a good component? It's going to get a positive review anyway, regardless of the price to the reviewer. Again, where is the conflict that causes a false review? Are you arguing that accomodation pricing causes good components to be given bad reviews? That doesn't make any sense either. Your "logic" is quite flawed - a discount won't improve a bad review, nor does it cause good components to be falsely disparaged. But if you think you can succeed where every other AA correspondent in the past has failed, have at it.
I'm sorry you took a broad characterization of journalism generally (i.e. not confined to audio) as some sort of personal swipe. That wasn't my intent. While I may not be the most articulate writer in the world I would venture that reading my post as such was a considerable leap.My friend's point, and I assure you that he is quite real, was that journalism, short of straight forward recounting of confirmed facts with no editorial comments, is inherently incapable of being unbiased and objective. It is by nature interpretive and the journalist will always bring his baggage (social, cultural, political, economic, emotional, etc.) into that interpretation. John Atkinson's measurements might have some claim to objectivity (I am not suggesting that they tell the whole story only that measurements, per se, can be relatively objective). Subjective reviews are inherently and inescapably biased. Any suggestion that a reviewer can completely wall off how he feels about the company, designer or importer completely defies both common sense and all available research. To offer another example of how bias can creep in example let us say that a reviewer is assigned to review a Dynavector DV20x2 but the reviewer has heard and was mightily impressed by the Dynavector DRT XV-1t. Would you really have us believe that that impression plus thoughts that "maybe I could afford/justify an XV-1t at half retail" never colors the review of the 20x2? The reviewer obviously is aware that a bad review of the 20 might cut off his access to accommodation pricing or an extended loan of a XV-1t. The intrusion of bias doesn't have to be a conscious process.
If we contrast audio journalism with a really good food/restaurant reviewer (yes, I'm well aware that most don't meet the following description), the food critic comes into the restaurant anonymously, pays for their meal at the same price everyone else pays (yes, they may expense the meal to the publication) and doesn't hang out with the cooks, servers or owner. In the best of all possible worlds the critic will also have some fairly serious cooking experience and/or training to inform their subjective interpretation. All this doesn't make the food reviewer objective but it at least reduces some obvious avenues for bias.
Until we can measure far better than we can today there will be room for subjective audio reviewers but claims of complete freedom from bias just makes the reviewing community look either rather simple or disingenuous. Speaking only for myself I tend to credence the comments of people who post here like Duke LeJeune, Bob Neill or Ozzy as much or more than most people with an (R) after their name in part because they make no claim to not being biased and make their biases quite public.
Edits: 03/01/12 03/01/12
You've managed to dream up one improbable situation where the possibility of a trade discount might - might! - influence the content of a review. The corruption would only happen if 1) the writer in question is a whore who is less interested in his integrity and reputation than in getting a discount on the pricier cartridge, and 2) the writer must have only the expensive Dynavector and no other cartridge from any other manufacturer, and 3) the Dynavector importer is a vindictive prick who punishes writers who don't rave about his entire line. Your scenario only works if all three conditions are met. Of course in real life the Dynavector importer is a nice guy who most likely would dismiss a negative review with a humorous comment about the reviewer's hearing rather than seeking revenge on him. But nevertheless you deserve praise for the novelty of your idea, even if it is as plausible as the absurd questions George Carlin concocted for the priest in his religious education classes as a child ("Father, suppose you're in a coma and miss your Sunday obligation, but you're on a ship and it crosses the international dateline so it's Sunday again, and you wake up - do you have to go to Mass?"). And your scenario still fails the broader challenge of explaining how trade discounts for reviewers routinely causes bad components to get undeserved praise or good components to be unjustly panned.
You might ask your invisible playmate to explain how the magazine publishing business works. Your claim that negative reviews would cause subscription rates to go up is risible.
You've managed to completely dodge the huge body of research that indicates that researchers, despite their best intentions, are highly susceptible to bias. Have you ever actually opened a scholarly journal in psychology, educational assessment, anthropology, field ecology or numerous other fields? Spend half a day in a good university library and you should easily be able to able to easily find twenty articles related to experimenter/observer/tester bias published in the last ten years. If you get a librarian to help you you can probably expand that count to fifty, many of them thoroughly peer reviewed. Of course we have your absolute assurance that you're better/purer than all those tedious science guys wasting their time with unnecessary elaborations in statistics and experimental methodology because you KNOW that you're impervious to bias either overt or subconscious. How could that possibly be interpreted as either monumental hubris or naivety? Are those priestly robes comfortable?The funny thing is that I'm actually not one of those people like the Hydrogen Audio crowd who insist that only measurements or statistically significant double blind listening tests are meaningful. As understand his position I'm probably closer to the sensibilities of someone like the late J. Gordon Holt.
Edits: 03/03/12
I've wasted enough time on you, obviously you can't defend your own illogic. Bye.
"You've managed to completely dodge the huge body of research that indicates that researchers, despite their best intentions, are highly susceptible to bias."
There are no unbiased experts. If you want to find out the truth of some matter you either do the necessary work yourself or you use someone else. If the latter, you are depending on that person's expertise and integrity. The problem is that experts gain their expertise through experience and that experience necessarily biases their point of view. Such is human nature. The legal system and investigative panels (such as the panels established by the National Research Council) deal with the problem by employing multiple experts and vetting their experience and biases. This works well, providing that the experts also have a certain amount of integrity. Having been an expert witness in Federal Court, I can tell you that it would have been a tough situation if I had been feeding out BS, as I would never have passed muster under the brutal cross-examination.
In the case of audio reviewers, there are two ways to calibrate a reviewer: compare their reviews with other reviews of the same product(s) and compare their reviews of products with which one is personally familiar with one's personal experience.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I guess some people are offended by accusations of being human. weird.
I think it very telling and a bit humorous that he took your response so personally. I also think it really concerning that he would think his experience as a reviewer demonstrative of the mechanics of the entire industry.
Let's see: I wrote that advertising and advertisers had no influence on anything that I wrote for Listener . Plantsman's response was that "claims that none of this, in any way, influences copy just doesn't pass the common sense test." And yet you're mystified why I might have taken that personally?
Edits: 03/02/12
I can tell you, many years ago, I sent a Vibraplane for review (will not publicly disclose to whom) but it was a major print mag who is still printing and after several months was sent a glowing review. In fact the reviewer actually called me the day the Vibraplane arrived and just couldn't get over what it did! Well after negotiating what I would charge him for the unit (below manufacturer cost) we set up a monthly payment plan. Never saw ANY $$$ and the review was never published. Yes there is politics in our industry just like every other industry to some extent. And yes this reviewer is still writing to this date and there is still controversy over him.
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