Hmm, I've been involved with and around many of the leading pubs throughout the years (coming in, oddly enough, from the automotive journalism scene). It's a tough call. A lot of the trouble with the domestic mountain bike magazine scene stems from the way the industry itself works even over the agendas of the editors.
See in the automotive biz, the magazines rarely if ever actually dealt with the manufacturers of the vehicles tested. There were PR firms that were allotted a given number of vehicles each year from each company and setting up a test was as simple as picking up the phone and telling them what you needed and for how long.
What this did in essence is it allowed for far more honesty in said reviews because the PR firms weren't directly affiliated with the companies in question. It didn't really matter to them what the magazine had to say because next year GM would be getting a few dozen models to them regardless. These people literally got paid by getting publicity to these models and were almost always quick to accommodate the press to make it happen.
Additionally, this method put quite a big gap between the editorial content and the advertisers influence since again, the manufacturers themselves had no idea what the editors were working on at a given moment.
The other way to get honest reviews is to go the Consumer Reports route where there is no advertising and any products tested are purchased by the publication (no PR favors in other words).
Here in the bicycle industry neither method of getting honest reviews is common. Most magazines are struggling to break even each month (you would be just blown away at what peanuts most mountain bike journalists work for). hence purchasing all of the bikes tested is out of the question. Making matters worse is that many mountain bike companies work directly with the publications (rather than sourcing their test fleet out through PR departments). As such, slam a given product and pretty much count on the company refusing to issue test bikes in the future. Do this enough and pretty soon you'll have nothing to test! Worse still, since many manufacturers are small enough that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing at all times, the risk of having a company yank its advertising is very, very real.
I've been doing it close to ten years now and I've never witnessed an industry as wacky as bicycle journalism. The whole way the industry works would have to be changed for the Ideal mountain bike magazine to come into existence (that or the publisher would have to be a multimillionaire going in). Ever hear the line that the way to reach a million in the bike industry is to start with two million? There's a lot of truth in that.
