Talk:Consumer Reports

Apparent misstatements

The article says this:

CR also forbids the use of its reviews for selling products; for example, it will not allow a manufacturer to advertise a positive review. CR has gone to court to enforce that rule.

I checked the first of the two cited sources, and it does not say anything that resembles what the sentence says. I do not know what the second cited source says (since it is paywalled), but these two sentences seem obviously incorrect on their face. As far as I know, the manufacturer of an evaluated product has no contract agreement with CR, and therefore has no enforceable constraints that govern its actions. Therefore, as far as I can tell, CR has no right nor any legal mechanism to control what a manufacturer (or anyone else) can and cannot say about their reviews (at least not in countries such as the United States where a principle of freedom of speech exists, at least as long as the manufacturer's statements are truthful and are within the bounds of fair use regarding copyright and trademark rights). Whatever this is trying to say, can someone please correct it? In the absence of a reaction, I plan to delete those statements, since they seem clearly incorrect.

I see some prior conversation about this in Talk:Consumer Reports/Archive 1 § Use in advertisements and Talk:Consumer Reports/Archive 1 § Bias again.

—BarrelProof (talk) 19:46, 20 September 2019 (UTC)

The only reference I can see regarding this is under CR's Commercial Use policy, which forbids "excerpts". I take this to basically mean a product's manufacturer cannot cherry-pick reviews for its benefit. To the first sentence in question, a manufacturer would not be allowed to only advertise a positive review (while ignoring negative reviews). Hope this helps. 3veritas3 (talk) 15:58, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

References

Expansion

What is the criteria for the admissibility of specific studies? 216.164.249.213 (talk) 23:13, 2 September 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: HIST 463 Consumerism in Modern America

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 September 2023 and 15 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Wcubias (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Alex Winetrout, Jacksonfarr1.

— Assignment last updated by Heinzam (talk) 19:00, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Major rewrite, sources

@BowAndCurtsy: Thanks for all the rewriting you have done for this article in the past few weeks.

I did Wikipedia projects at Consumer Reports from 2012-18 as Wikimedian in Residence. While I was there I did not develop this article so much because of WP:COI, but I am and have long been deeply committed to Consumer Reports and fascinated by what they do. I do not think that I have talked with anyone there about institutional or work things since 2019.

Now that I have been gone since 2018 I have considered developing the article. I do have unpublished draft content in my user space from years ago, telling some stories. You are obviously interested in the org - if you see fit to use any of this, then have at it. At the time when I wrote this, I had access to info. Neither Consumer Reports nor the Wikipedia community wanted staff writing about the org in Wikipedia, but as times passes I think more about what I could do now independently that could be useful for the Consumer Movement.

• User:Bluerasberry/History of Consumer Reports - historical content
• User:Bluerasberry/template:Consumer Reports - navigational box
• User:Bluerasberry/cr - draft of a main article
• User:Bluerasberry/cr (publication) - article for just the publications

Bluerasberry (talk) 18:58, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Bluerasberry I like subjects about helping the consumer as well. I'm also interested in rating guides and testing products. I've been editing pages on these subjects trying to clean things up and make Wikipedia better. Thanks for the info. I'll take a look and keep it in mind. BowAndCurtsy (talk) 21:42, 8 December 2025 (UTC)