Quote:
W8MM said:
Carlos,

An increase (of an undisclosed amount) in editorial exposure doesn't equate to favoritism in evaluation.

Or, am I missing something in this survey?

Also, just because a result is statisitically significant doesn't mean it's causative. It could be that the bigger advertisers had more product variety to cover. No?



Both points you raise are absolutely true, I agree, its not causative nor does it prove favoritism, but that would be very hard to prove since it would be a very subjective outcome messure and not objective.
But nevertheless its certainly as close as its gets to pointing to that direction. In a perfect world I'd give them the benefit of the doubt but in our world it doesn't take for me any studies to distrust such mags in that respect, money talks, and we see it when we read these mags, they will get away with as much favoritism as their readers permit, its like in politics.

Just as an example, a spanish magazine (a mediocre one for masses BTW) just came out with a comparison between a Seat TDI and the Porsche 997! tittled "the diesel Ibiza does not shy from the Porsche 911"... they "showed" recuperations were the Ibiza beats the 997, and praise the efficient and easy handling of the Ibiza while they complain about the "peculiar" handling of the 997 calling it its nose heavy! this is a rear-engined RWD car compared to a FWD front-engined diesel hatchback! Guess how such a ridiculous piece gets published?
This is a disease of mainstream car magazines, though some magazines remain more pure (I case of americam mags Sport Car International is an example, not to mention the quality of the information and content), and though I'm sure there are good journo's in Car&Driver or such, they are out numbered and do not control what the mag publish. Moderately knowledgeable sportcar enthusiasts like us can pick out all this favoritism and filter it when we read these magazines, but thats a minority of the readers I'm afraid