Non-Credible?
Dear Gary: For the first time since I subscribed to Widescreen Review I have to say that I am very disappointed in your ethics. Why would a magazine which caters to the “early adopters” and “technophiles” lower themselves to one-sided (obviously advertisement funding-backed), opinionated journalism? When I saw the article online I eagerly read it (“IEEE 1394 vs. DVI,” which appeared in Issue 62, July). This is such a hotly debated issue and most people do not understand the technology. I read the article with great interest until it became apparent that the author has a political motivation for disliking DVI, and therefore the entire article is biased. To ad insult to injury, the last two paragraphs are a marketing pitch for Mitsubishi. As I am sure you are aware, Mitsubishi is the only manufacturer that is not backing DVI, so it is in their financial interest (or more directly, if DVI is accepted, Mitsubishi stands to lose everything, not to mention that Bob Perry stands to gain financially from his involvement not only with Mitsubishi, but also the HAVi group) for everyone to band together and hate DVI. So was it your intention to try and mislead your reader base into believing that this was a accurate comparison of these competing technologies? I truly hope not! I think you owe it to your reader base to respond to why you allowed Bob Perry to write this article for your otherwise great magazine. I would hate to think that the magazine I have come to trust, to help make my home theatre buying decisions, has not become so unethical that they would allow financial incentives to mislead their readers
Sean Sharpe
Editor-In-Chief Gary Reber Comments:
I thought Bob Perry’s article was a reasonably balanced effort to present the technical aspects of two digital interfaces. “About The Author,” which followed Perry’s article presented his credentials. I intend to publish other articles by technologists representing each digital interface in future issues, and it can be expected that their points of view will be biased toward their support of a particular digital interface. But then, I believe our readers are intelligent enough to sort through such articles and determine the biases, if any. And for the record, advertising from Mitsubishi was not a consideration in the motivation to publish Perry’s article. In fact, Mitsubishi, unfortunately, infrequently advertises and, therefore, denies themselves access to our enthusiast audience at the forefront of HDTV adoption.
You can E-mail Widescreen Review @ mailto:editorgary@widescreenreview.com