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ben, lj said:
fwiw, GM is the largest automobile advertiser in C&D and R&T and i can't help but wonder sometimes if that has any effect on the numbers and conclusions contained in them.
Ben,
I have known a good many of the editors/test-drivers at both magazines. Some for as long as twenty-five years. I can honestly say that they all try to get the "best" numbers possible for every car they test. It's a point of competitive pride between magazines.
They also have an informal system of peer review that prevents long-term bias from taking hold. Sure, some individual writer may have a distaste or fetish for some particualr brand or name plate. But, the other writers find ways to balance this out, if not in the same story, at least over time.
Car magazines do develop a personality or group-think over a period of years that becomes obvious to the reader. That's what causes individuals to be drawn to or repelled from certain journals -- agreement (or not) with the underlying assumptions of "what makes for the best car?"
Car and Driver has a very performance-oriented mind set. Most of the old-timers there are graduates of various engineering schools (Iowa, MIT, etc.) with time served in Detroit auto industry engineering jobs before they became journalists. They value hard numbers as a way of life, and I think their writing over the years has that obvious flavor.
The advertising-driven publishers' expediency that might try to corrupt good reporting is often headed-off at the pass. David E. Davis once instructed Car and Driver's road testers to include (over their objections) a Mercedes 190 in a test of best-handling "imported" cars where I had the good fortune to hang out as it was under way. I have a video of the test driver calling the 190 a "teutonic turd" after struggling to get it around the various timed test courses in the most complimentary fashion. All the track photos and mountain-road beauty shots were taken with the 190 in the mix. After the test was wrapped up, the project editor called Davis with the results.
After hearing how out-classed the 190 was in the midst of the competition (Porsche, Ferrari, Honda, Lotus, Audi), Davis decided to spare Mercedes the embarassment. The photos were tweaked by the art department to remove the 190 and the story that ran in the magazine never mentioned Mercedes in any way.
Is that bias? Or, is it just good manners?