Many of us believe we are well-informed shoppers, clutching our product reviews from Consumer Reports and the various specialty magazines devoted to cars, cameras, stereo, and other consumer products.  But this view overlooks certain important factors--not the least of which is the frequency with which the consumer media end up being wrong.

Remember the Chevrolet Vega? It was lavishly praised by the automotive press at the time of its introduction; only much later did its problems begin to be discovered.  

Other stories show that the media are just as prone to err in the opposite direction.  For example, years after its U.S. sales had been virtually wiped out by media reports of "sudden acceleration," the Audi 5000 was finally found by the U.S. Department of Transportation not to suffer from any such problem.

Even when they are not making outright blunders, the consumer media exert a funneling effect on information and purchasing decisions that is disquieting. It is one thing to base an economic system on the individual choices of vast numbers of reasonably knowledgeable shoppers, and quite another to base it on the judgments of perhaps 20 to 100 writers with deadlines to meet, other stories to complete, and a motivation to sell copies by focusing on what is considered "hot" or current at the moment.

But more fundamentally still, we need to consider what the rise of consumer journalism is based on. Do you suppose that in, say, 1750, anybody would have read an article on "How to Tell a Good Apple From a Spoiled One?" How about "How to Tell Coarse Cloth from Fine Woven Goods"? And would they have bought a compilation of such articles? Twelve times a year? What makes the prospect of such a periodical ludicrous, when our own Consumer Reports is not, is simply the difference in product complexity, and a corresponding difference in buyer uncertainty.  The less capable we are of evaluating products, the more need we feel for consumer journalism.

Or to put it a different way, although Consumer Reports may give us a veneer of consumer sophistication, its own economic viability depends on an underlying public confusion about shopping choices. Thus, the current proliferation of consumer journalism is more fundamentally indicative of bafflement than of knowledgeability.