The politics of automotive journalism

[mchastek]

For many consumer car magazines, I'm SURE advertising dollars talk. If a company is writing checks to have ads in a magazine, the magazine obviously has an incentive to write positive articles and reviews about that particular company's cars.

A while back, I ran into someone who used to write reviews for a well-known motorcycle magazine. I asked him how he personally dealt with the politics of advertising dollars. He honestly said that he wrote the reviews exactly as he believed they should be written. He said motorcycles have come such a long way in the last 20-30 years that he really couldn't find anything bad to say about any of the ones he reviewed.

How do you think the car magazines deal with this, and how do you think it impacts consumers and their beliefs?

[Viper 10]

Mark:


There is a direct correlation between advertising dollars spent and the amount of coverage and visibility that a manufacturer gets. Anyone who says otherwise is being idealistic and naive. Notice that GM gets tons of articles writtten about how great Corvettes are in spite of the fact that other cars like the Viper beat it in every performance category since Vipers came out... except for creature comforts like cup holders and cruise control.

Tell me why you think that a car magazine will match up cars in the performance market that aren't even in the same price range or buyer markets? Why? Because that's the only shootout thatt hey can win... who cares that there is a $100,000 price difference... $280,000 Ferrari's don't like to get their clocks cleaned by $60k and $80k cars. They match up the face-offs so that a specific manufacture will win. They rate cars based on who pays the editors salary.

Autoweek is a magazine that used to be unbiased until they started drinking the Kool-Aid. At least they had experienced drivers evaluate true performance at one time in their past... I canceled my subscription because they joined the ranks of the mainstream automotive magazines.

Along these same lines, they have created a generation of magazine and dyno jockey readers who can only measure a car on price and HP. Most of these readers haven't clue what the real car and driving experience is about. Case in point; this is exactly why idiots buy Dodge Vipers and why almost 40% have been totaled and are sitting in junkyards.

This also is the same in the Ferrari market where it attracts another breed of idiot who pays over $100,000 mark up on cars that are being scammed by the Ferrari dealers.... as the factory turns and looks the other way. The quality of Ferrari owners (and other exotics) has gone into the toilet and the result is a bunch of snobs who buy cars based on status and price and haven't a clue how to drive them or enjoy them. The magazines are partially responsible for creating this type of buyer and those slimy dealers. Those dealers should be thrown in jail for price fixing and market manipulation.

I never look to magazine for unbiased information.

Brad