Oops!

Consumer Reports has an unparalleled record of carefully analyzing products and reporting on their strengths and weaknesses. (Hat tip to Ian S. at The Inoperable Terran) When they turned their eye toward the high-end ($200-$500) air purifiers marketed by The Sharper Image, it seems that The Sharper Image did not like the lab results and sued Consumer Reports. The news today is that Consumer Reports won... (heh...) David Lazarus at SFGate has the story: bq. U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney dismissed a lawsuit filed by San Francisco's Sharper Image that claimed Consumer Reports magazine unfairly maligned the company's hottest product, its Ionic Breeze air purifier. bq. "Sharper Image has not demonstrated a reasonable probability that any of the challenged statements were false," Chesney wrote in her ruling. The article quotes Steve Williams, an attorney for Consumers Union: bq. "What this case was really about was the First Amendment and the right to free speech," Williams told me. "This is very frightening. bq. "Consumers Union may not have backed down, but how willing will magazines like Good Housekeeping be in the future to criticize products? How willing will newspapers be to do independent reviews?" bq. Good questions. I tried to put them to Sharper Image, but no one at the company, including its founder, Richard Thalheimer, returned my calls. bq. In February 2002, Consumer Reports published a lengthy article reviewing 16 different air purifiers. It placed the Ionic Breeze Quadra model at the bottom of its rankings, saying the device produced "no measurable reduction in airborne particles." bq. Williams, the Consumers Union attorney, said Sharper Image complained after the article was published that the tests were unfair. (Consumer Reports had placed each purifier in a room and measured how much dust and smoke were removed from the air in a half-hour.) bq. "They said the Ionic Breeze needed to run longer," Williams said. "So Consumer Reports went back and tested again, this time seeing how much cigarette smoke could be removed over 19 hours. It couldn't even clean the smoke from one-eighth of a cigarette." bq. Consumer Reports ran a second article on purifiers in October 2003. Once again, Ionic Breeze ended up near the bottom of the magazine's rankings. bq. "They told Consumers Union again that the test was unfair," Williams said. "So Consumers Union asked what test they'd like to run. They have never, to this day, recommended a test for Consumers Union to do." bq. Sharper Image filed suit in September 2003, shortly after learning the results of the second test. The case was dismissed last week. Sharper Image was ordered to pay about $400,000 in Consumers Union's legal costs. bq. Consumers Union has been sued 15 times over its product reviews since 1968. It has never once had to pay any money or issue a retraction. Emphasis mine - they may not always test the latest and greatest but their lab-work is impeccable. I would trust them a lot more than the manufacturer when it comes to a rating of a product...