Great - no, they ARE an independent rater - but not 'sell-side' i.e. wall street brokers trying to get you to buy something - here's a bit of text - if you have an online bokerage account you can access the full rpt:

Resource Capital Corp. (NYSE:RSO) -- Real Estate Operations/Services Reuters Company Research
Performance Rating: Outperform
Reuters ratings are based on a proprietary model that leverages widely accepted statistical methods and financial concepts to select attributes shown to be strong indicators of future stock price performance and applies these to rank stocks along a normal distribution curve. Ranks for Fundamental Quality, Value Catch-up, Operational Trends and Technical Factors are combined into a Composite Rating of Outperform, Neutral or Underperform.

Fundamental Quality Component: Outperform
This rating is based on characteristics traditionally associated with "good" companies. We focus on how each company

This rating is based on analyses of share price movements over a variety of time periods. We compare performance characteristics of individual stocks with those of all the others we rate. Generally speaking, our goal is to favor up-trending shares that have experienced recent corrections and de-emphasize down-trending shares experiencing uncharacteristic periods of strength. Here is how RSO shares performed during the various periods we examined.