This column resumes.

Most of you probably saw Car and Driver’s article on the M3, 911 Turbo, and Nissan GTR. And most of you disliked the conclusion: the M3 better than the GTR and the Turbo? Ridiculous. Impossible. Another instance of Car and Driver’s predictable BMW fetish.

When I drafted this article on Friday, CarandDriver.com had 88 pages of comments, many of which rage against the magazine and Tony Quiroga. Autoblog picked up the story earlier last week and threw its proverbial gauntlet down against the “increasingly irrelevant” Car and Driver.

I could do the same and attack Car and Driver’s choices, criteria, and biases. But the larger issue is that this article shouldn’t be read as a comparison because it has no objective baseline or scope. And while I understand that mainstream automotive writing is intended to be subjective, the comparisons in the Car and Driver article are so subjective that I can’t take them too seriously.

We’d all like to see more thoughtful—or at least more specific—comparisons in major automotive publications. Perhaps the GTR could have lapped against the new STI as a way of looking at turbocharged, AWD cars of different weights. Or put the GTR up against the 911 Turbo and the Audi R8. Give me those 3 cars and a weekend at Watkins Glen, and I’m sure I could offer some interesting insights on the on-track nuances of 3 fairly heavy AWD cars with distinct drivetrain configurations instead of the old standard car magazine boilerplate.

Alternatively, the GTR could have gone up against a pair of luxury coupes in the 65,000-90,000 price range in a street comparison. I can understand a street-only style and comfort comparison between the GTR, M3, and non-turbo 911 (for instance), so long as while I’m reading along I don’t suddenly find myself reading about which one has the greatest propensity to snap the tail around on the track.

But I can’t heap all of this on Car and Driver or Tony Quiroga. Quiroga is in the unenviable position of writing for the broadest of automotive audiences. It’s much easier to write for an audience of racers or an audience of upper middle class types that want to go out and buy a little style, a little acceleration, and a little pizzazz. Give me a magazine full of mid-90s econo-boxes prepped for road racing and I could ask for no more. Give the conservative, middle-aged Audi enthusiast a magazine with A4 or the S8 cruising down a European street inside, and he’ll likely be content.

In casting so wide a net, Car and Driver has to throw each segment of its audience a proverbial bone. Lap times for the race-minded. Thoughts on road noise for the stylish. Outright acceleration times for the posers. And comments on the size of the trunk and the price for the practical and budget-minded (whoever they are).

Is the Car and Driver article a bit ridiculous? Sure. But is it necessarily bad writing or poor logic? Not, I think, to the degree that the backlash implies. It’s the product of a publication that caters to a broad and largely end-user audience. I might not like the conclusion. But, in the end, it wasn’t written for me. I’m over it.