(emphasis mine)
You are right on Cory! There is no precedence for this that I can think of either. Before you say, "Amazon, Ebay, Cabelas, Lowes, etc all have negative reviews" it is important to realize those are largely negative product/reseller reviews, NOT negative reviews ABOUT the primary retailer. Amazon doesn't really care what product you buy from which reseller, so long as you buy it from Amazon, right? That isn't an apples to apples comparison. It would be like posting mixed reviews on a Chevy Cobalt to aid your consumer's research and retain them on your site, you stay above the fray because you offer more than Cobalt's.
Hmm... I'm already not making friends here so I might as well speak my mind, right? Cory, if this is such a great plan to build confidence from your potential customers why aren't there any negative reviews of Cobalt here? I didn't see any negative sentiment about Digital Airstrike here either? Did GM ONLY get rave reviews of all their models or shouldn't we see some negative press included here too to show we're honest? I'm just asking the question?
I'm going to take a stab at why they are forcing this, but this is just my opinion. I could be wrong, it has happened once before. 
When you say: I feel that a negative review is needed every now and again on review sites to keep things honest. I think you get right to the meat of the issue. They are trying to compensate for the fact that your website isn't a review site. By forcing negative content into the marketing feed they are trying to simulate a credible third party when in fact they are an agent of the retailer. Let me try to rephrase that for clarity. They have to try to compensate for the fact that they have complete CONTROL! If they collected, "verified", and posted reviews about you FOR you without including negatives no consumer would believe a thing they were reading, right? The consumer would immediately discredit what they were reading as advertising. What YOU say about YOU is purely advertising and has NO intrinsic value to the consumer. Negative reviews are included to attempt to build content credibility because they recognize that the consumer is naturally challenging the credibility of the content they perceive to be about you from you.
I agree with you Cory. The more I think about the Amazon example above the more convinced I become that this initiative was never about the success of the individual dealer.
