Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog

“Why should we feed the hand that bites us?”
The warning delivered yesterday to magazine publishers by GM North America chairman, Robert Lutz, has implications that go beyond the magazine industry. In a speech to the American Magazine Conference, Lutz said biased reporting could lead to decreased ad dollars, something every news director has heard at one time or another in his or her life. But Lutz brought examples, including this one:

…he cited reviews of sport utility vehicles in one issue of Primedia’s Automobile magazine. In its review of a not-yet-available Mercedes model, a reference was made to the SUV’s “sophisticated” electronics. But a roughly comparable system on an SUV made by GM’s Cadillac division was dismissed as having “the usual Buck Rogers electronic hoo-hah.”