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RE: One of the problems with ezines...

From what I've seen, whether a magazine has a real firewall or not depends entirely on the publishers. Stereo Review and High Fidelity obviously didn't, and I'm guessing they were representative of the majority of publications at the time. But I mentioned the Reader's Digest, which rejected tobacco ads and campaigned against tobacco use. I remember too the New York Times having ads withdrawn when it ran some kind of article that the drug industry found unflattering. So there are always some publications that act with integrity.

Consumer Reports and even Mad Magazine refused advertising. Before we laugh -- would we kids have had those great fake ads skewering Madison Avenue falsehoods if they hadn't? Both Stereophile and TAS were ad-free when they started. Not only did it remove one avenue of potential bias and pressure, it makes that clear to the readers who otherwise have no way of distinguishing between an honest and dishonest publication. Sure, the magazines were expensive then, but if you're spending thousands on equipment, that seems a minor expense.

Of course, that doesn't remove other possible sources of bias, not the least of which is that if a product isn't getting good reviews the manufacturer can withhold review samples. So a manufacturer can cherry-pick reviewers who like his product, sending horns to the horn-lover, SET's to the SET-lover, etc. Sure, if you read every show report and forum post you'll learn that this product wasn't reviewed because the manufacturer wouldn't provide a sample, that one because it wasn't very good, a third one because there were just too many products to review them all. But most readers don't have the time to do that.


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  Kimber Kable  


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