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My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or new
by eigenvector 10y ago
My favourite example of this is the Economist news magazine. The Economist reports on a much larger range of country and topics than the typical magazine or newspaper. Many of its readers like it for that exact reason: it gives them information on stories they won't normally find in their local or national news sources and they want to be informed about, say, hydroelectric developments in the Congo.
The problem is that writing about 25 different countries in a single issue doesn't mean they actually have experts on most of those places or people on the ground to do original reporting. Often, it devolves into British or American writers regurgitating inaccurate information from the Internet. But if it's the only thing you read about, say, forest exports from Myanmar, you have no reason to question it.
The easiest way to see this is to be a non-US/UK/EU person and read an article in the Economist about your own country. Then you realize that all the other articles are just as simplistic and uninformed.
- colordrops 10y agoThe Economist also has a fairly evident political agenda.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoI don't follow it that closely, but aren't they also pretty up-front about their own bias? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance
- gaius 10y agoIndeed, and that is why I very rarely read it - for me, it would be too echo-chambery. I read the NYT quite deliberately and every day, enumerate why Krugman and Blow are wrong about whatever they are pontificating about...
- siberianbear 10y agoHas The Economist shifted? I started reading it in about 2000, and at the time I really liked it because it seemed so intelligent and neutral. It seemed like such a pleasure to read something that went deep into interesting topics without an obvious axe to grind. In the past ten years it seems to have drifted gradually leftward. Sometimes I can't reconsile The Economist of 2000 with the one of 2016. Did The Economist move gradually to the left or did I move to the right?
- RodericDay 10y agoLeft? The Economist has a blatant liberal slant.
- tonyedgecombe 10y agoI think it depends on your viewpoint.
- tao_oat 10y agoI think The Economist is pretty open about their liberal slant (Adam Smith liberal, not US politics liberal).
- friedman23 10y agoI would think that a publication called 'The Economist' would be Adam Smith free market liberals.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoEssentially it is, with caveats. The Economist was originally a publication set up to protest the Corn Laws and their distortion of the marketplace. The stance has shifted over the years but the tone is often inline with the founding idea that people and businesses should be left up to their own devices unless there is an excellent reason to intervene.
- erelde 10y agoIf $xyz seems neutral to you, then it might mean you are politically and tonally aligned with $xyz ?
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- Kurtz79 10y ago...compared to those outlets where is not that evident ? Because I cannot think of any publication that I would call completely impartial (it also would make for pretty dry reading).
- tormeh 10y agoVery true, but TE is usually way less wrong than the alternatives. The journalists there at least seem to know how to use Wikipedia. I mean, what am I supposed to read instead?
- zmb_ 10y agoMy experience is the opposite. And I'm definitely not blind to the Gell-Mann Amnesia, I notice it on Wikipedia all the time. I've noticed that in The Economist the articles about my field of technology, work, and my small home country, have been accurate to the point that I suspect they have had experts in the field involved in creating them. That gives me confidence in the articles about issues I'm not intimately familiar with. That is why The Economist is one of the few news sources I read after cutting out following daily news completely. As a result I'm much better informed about the facts and issues than I was when reading huge amounts of daily news. It boils down to a difference between consuming mostly noise and consuming mostly signal.
- eigenvector 10y agoInteresting. My own area of knowledge is renewable energy, a topic which appears with moderate frequency in TE. I would say 8/10 articles are merely repackaging reports published by major global consultancies like McKinsey, Navigant, etc. that I had seen two or three months earlier through my employer (a large multinational energy company). I would not say the information is not correct, but it hardly insightful and often presents an incomplete picture which looks at the industry primarily from the perspective of financiers.
- varjag 10y agoWell that's why it's not called The Technologist I guess :) It's hard to expect non-specialist publication to write anything non-trite to an expert in the field, but just not botching up the basic facts is often refreshing.
- pjc50 10y agoRepackaging reports and press releases (without attribution!) is major problem in news everywhere.
- bigchewy 10y agoperhaps not insightful to you, someone with knowledge of the area. but how about others? how about me? where should I gain my insights into all of the various industries that I don't have direct knowledge of today?
- zorked 10y agoI am from a non-US, non-EU, non-UK country and the Economist coverage about my country isn't perfect but it's pretty decent.
- fegu 10y agoNon-UK after non-EU already? the brexit hasn't happened yet :)
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoTo be fair, I live in the such a country. Only, in my case, it is Norway, so it is kind of different altogether.
- lowkeyokay 10y agoReading the above quote from Micheal Chrichton, I immediately thought about The Economist and how they are usually well informed. I remember a short article on some legal case in rap music. I used to be very into rap, and while I didn't learn a lot from the article it did confirm that the writers take it very seriously whatever topic they are reporting on. I stopped reading TE because I was put off by their too steadfast belief in monetarism as the be it end all. To their credit, they are pretty upfront about that though.
- speleding 10y agoActually, the Economist has about 400 reporters for a 50 page weekly magazine, about 8 per page, so they do have enough people to include experts for all those fields. The times I read an Economist article about my country or my line of work the coverage was actually very good, but your milage may vary.
- galfarragem 10y agoThe Economist is not perfect but is the best news source I know, by far.