I don't think it kind to suggest that the mag doesn't hold anything up to scrutiny
Most of the time it doesn't, and it doesn't try to. I'm becoming increasingly unclear what magazine you're reading. In common with all other magazines of roughly the same ilk (of which there are hundreds) it reports what it is told by PR and marketing people, takes shiney pictures of gadgets, garmets and devices, prints some blurb about them, tests things in a rather vague and unscientific, but reasonably useful and amusing sort of way and attempts to compare them, in a way which usually involves stating that they're all actually for different things and it isn't fair to compare them, or which comes to the conclusion that they're all quite good and you should make up your own mind. You will never read any of the following articles:
- "2010 Shimano proven to be better than 2010 SRAM"
- "Bike pricing cartel exposed"
- "There is no such thing as "slope-style" - it's marketing bullshit"
- "QR's and disc brakes are a deadly combination - our lab tests reveal"
- "Bike manufacturers fail to pass on falling aluminium price to consumers"
- "People should spend less on bikes and just have fun"
- "Revealed - the child slavery at the heart of Taiwan's bike industry"
etc etc (no sugestion that there is a grain of truth in any of these should be implied). You just won't. You'll read endlessly about how everything keeps getting better and better so you should buy it, that maybe, just maybe, this one isn't as good as it should be, that they had a pre-production sample and the product has been improved for 2010 etc. That they had a nice ride, that such-and-such a place is well worth a visit, that some chap at CyB has created a really good new trail.
That's just how it works. Everyone except you knows that, and no-one except you greatly cares. I know I'm not reading hard-hitting investigative journalism, I'm fully aware I'm reading a trade mag mostly filled with PR and fluff. It's reasonably entertaining, and provides a certain amount of information. But "scrutiny" is simply not the game.
It is (as Mark has pointed out repeatedly) part of the bike industry. It does not have the relationship to the bike industry that we expect Private Eye to have to government. It doesn't have a libel defence fund (I shouldn't think), it doesn't have the business model to support investigations or the production of articles containing serious analysis of independently-collected data. It just isn't like that at all.
It is however a good magazine run by perfectly decent people. You're seeking to hold it to a standard that it doesn't purport to reach. If you feel it is important that someone should "take up the mantle" of critiquing the bike industry from the outside then you're probably right, it might well be healthy. If you did it well, we'd all buy less stuff, possibly have more fun, spend less money, worry less about a whole lot of things. The "industry" as we understand it might well contract however, and your efforts would not net you a living. You'd not be producing a glossy magazine and a popular website, you'd have a small blog, which would cost you money. You could do it, of course. But don't expect someone who's decided to do something else, from which they can make money and have fun, to be doing what you could do but aren't.
Don't bother selectively quoting bits of this in italics with tediously provocative non-sequiturs about how this is like slavery/cannibalism/pederasty incidentally. I'm almost certainly not going to rise to it.