It' s just business. If you want a monthly magazine that is completely honest and unbiased in its evaluation of various different products, then you should be willing to pay a lot more money for your subscription because they won' t have any advertisers to pick up most of the tab. I would bet that most, if not all, of any given magazine' s operating expenses are covered by its advertising revenue, so the subscription revenue is profit. The magazines can' t afford to lose the big-name advertisers who pay tens of thousands of dollars to run a full-page full-color ad in that magazine by slamming their product even if the evaluation is true. They lose a big advertiser then the price of the subscription would have to go up to cover the loss. If the price gets too high people won' t buy the magazine, which will cause more advertisers to stop advertising which puts the magazine out of business.

That being said, I think that many of the gun mags do write differently about a sub-standard product, but they are just more discrete about it. The review might come off as more neutral rather than just outright saying the product sucks. Or, if it really is that bad they might not print the review at all. Where a glowing review might be the magazine' s way of saying that the product really is pretty good.

Mike