Garbage in, garbage out

Unquestioning use of the data from the Federation of the International Periodical Press (FIPP) may lead to a good deal of misunderstanding. The current issue of World Magazine Trends states, for instance, that Canada has 1,000 consumer magazines and no business/trade magazines. In fact, Statscan data shows that there are more than 2,000 titles, of which about 600 are trades. So how seriously can we take the data which follows from FIPP, such as adshare? It says we have US$380 million. Statscan data shows more like C$810 million (US$655 million). FIPP says:
This annual book remains the authoritative source of industry data for the world’s magazine publishing community. It provides industry information about consumer, customer and business-to-business magazine markets.
Uh-huh.