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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I sure wish I had one to recommend. I asked this question on Facebook last year and got a bunch of good responses from some friends:

* The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)

* Wall Street Journal

* BBC

* Christian Science Monitor

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The Economist is not particularly left-leaning - they're quite in favor of free markets and a light regulatory touch for many things.

The Financial Times is another good one.

I mostly agree, but I felt like they were bursting at the seams to criticize Trump. Hardly a piece on the site that I RECALL had anything positive to say about the Brexit, Trump, or other movements. I like to read positive and negatives for both. Overall, a good site/magazine.

Better to say that The Economist is pro-globalism, right or left.

Yeah maybe that's more accurate, depending on what you mean by globalism.

guess that depends on your definition of globalism.

the economist is pro imf/world bank.

that is less pro globalisation and more pro * poorer nations for the Western profit incentive.

which isnt quite an equivalence.

Isofar as "left" and "right" have meaning, globalism is right, not left. A "left" globalism would be an international workers/labor movement, which Economist does not support.

> I felt like they were bursting at the seams to criticize Trump

Could be, there's a reason for that. With some things, the two sides do not really merit the same consideration. Slavery, for instance is an easy one, not something where you need 'fair and balanced' coverage of 'both sides of the issue'. Not comparing Trump to slavery, mind you, but from their editorial stance, he combines a number of worryingly illiberal qualities that are antithetical to their position. They were (and are) the same way about Silvio Berlusconi, despite not having a lot in common with some of his past left-wing opposition.

Of course. I just would prefer a little more opposition to the liberal imperialism at times. It would be great to have a journal that's somehow even more sophisticated than the Economist, taking into different viewpoints and understandings of the world. Just as a quick example, I don't see much in the way of opposition to war, or the positive side of something like charter schools. Note that these are things I'm just interested in reading contrasting viewpoints about. I am fortunate enough though that I can find books to fill these voids.

> positive side of something like charter schools

The Economist certainly have done this, they used to do one every few months. It's strange, I'd say charter schools were a very "neoliberal" policy.

Yeah these were just examples. Might not have been good ones.

propublica.org

It's hard to call them "news", but they do important research and expose

The alleged positives of Brexit have the problem of being incoherent: because there's no fixed policy manifesto for it, people keep citing conflicting advantages. Such as ending agricultural subsidies - while telling the farmers that they're not going to lose out.

Noam Chomsky said the FT is the only paper that tells the truth, since the interests of the readers and the publication are aligned in making money. One thing I read from Superforecasters though is that the best forecasters read a vast array of sources, actively challenging their own biases. It seemed that the most realistic perspective was not to be found in any one newspaper.

I suspect that Chomsky was taking a swipe at aleged money-grubbing readers, but I agree. It's refreshing to read their advertising charter.

http://aboutus.ft.com/corporate-information/ft-company/adver...

(Yes, people don't like paying a fee and seeing ads, but (a) that's reality and (b) the complaints are an arbitrary binary viewpoint that lacks foundation)

Are you certain it was FT that Chomsky said that about? He's said something nearly identical about WSJ in an article I read a few months ago

Look at some of the writers' twitter streams. Incredibly far-left invective. The paper itself is progressive-left but their true opinions shine through sometimes taking it a bit farther left than that. Great weekly read though overall.

> The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)

The Economist's mission statement is, almost literally, to advance neoliberal (unrelated to the canonical American definition of 'liberal') thought and policies across the globe. Any further to the right, and you would be in the territory of Mises/Friedman/Hayek, with privatized roads and 'gold standards'.

We live in a time when people who are to the right of Reagan are at times described un-ironically as "liberal".

It concerns me that people can consider the economist "left-leaning", it shows how far to the right the U.S. (and with it much of the world) has shifted.

The U.S. was way ahead of the rest of the world on this, and has always been a lot more conservative than Europe, but it's cultural influence has had the effect of moving Europe to the right by painting the middle ground as "left wing" so Europe makes concessions on things like privatisation of infrastructure (e.g. for better or worse privatisation of telecommunications in Europe in the 80s was pushed by the US).

It hasn't been all bad of course, part of the reason the recent election result is so painful is because progressive poltics has made a huge amount of progress.

In 25 years the US has gone from racist, homophobic and dealing with the effects of prohibition (the "war on drugs") to the society we have now which is dealing with it's issue of race far better than Europe (which continues to bury it's head in the sand over the issue), allowing gay marriage, serving in the military regardless of (open) sexual preference, and de-criminalising or legalising cannabis.

The US has faced up and is dealing with it's racism problem. Europe always saw itself as "nowhere near as bad as the US", which was true when the US had lynchings. And there is still plenty of work to the done in the US particularly around the justice system and other institutional effects which lead back to social injustice. But the trajectory is there for the US, while in Europe it feels like racism is a growing problem which isn't being tackled at all.

So it's understandable that people who were already set in their ways 25 years ago (indeed many current voters were approaching retirement 25 years ago) see the modern world and react with horror at all the progress.

Trump said he's going to "win so much we'll be sick and tired of winning", well Trump isn't a winner, progressives should be shouting that Trump is weak if he's tired of winning because he's won an election or two, because progressives have been winning for 25 years and we're not going to get tired of winning any time soon.

So the dramatic shift to the right has to been in context. The sky isn't going to fall but while huge progress has been made on social issues; on issues such as economic policy, policing and commercial rights there has been a slow constant erosion and shift to the right.

So the shift to the right socially is dangerous because reversing canoe from paddling upstream against a right-wing under-current will act as an enabler where you can quickly find yourself in shit creek without a paddle.

"Liberal" means different things in Europe and the US. In Europe, it's more along the lines of "classic liberal", which is not left-leaning, particularly, although The Economist does espouse some things that some elements of the left in the US do, such as legalization of drugs and gun control. They have also endorsed Democrats in the presidential elections, such as Hillary, as well as Republicans, in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

It's perfectly possible to disagree with them on a variety of issues, but pigeonholing them as 'left' or 'right' is inaccurate.

Of course, progressive politics of the kind you talk about is entirely compatible with neoliberalism. So to the extent that the Left is primarily focused on those things and demands that people subsume other concerns to them, it ceases to provide any opposition to neoliberalism. Which is why the Economist can be described as left-leaning - the world hasn't shifted to the right, though that's a convenient way for the people on the left who've abandoned these causes to shift blame elsewhere, instead the axis along which the two are divided is twisting sideways.

It's a sad state of affairs when the Economist, the mouthpiece of globalized freemarketeer elites, can be nonchalantly branded "left-leaning". Left of whom, Darth Vader?

Left of Brietbart, which is now the standard template for the right. Overton window, ho!

Great suggestions of course. I too take issue with calling The Economist "left-leaning". If you'd have said "liberal" (as in Liberal Democracy) I would accept that.

I can see how the Economist might be described as liberal by a European, but they are decidedly not left-leaning. I would say that they are right-leaning even by American standards.

Mostly they are pro free trade free enterprise more than right wing, left wing. So when the left is pro trade, it would appear they are left leaning, when their position coincides with right aisle politics, they appear right wing. In other words, economics colours their perspective rather than politics but it can appear to be the opposite.

> * The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)

-With all due respect, calling The Economist left-leaning makes about as much sense as calling Marx a right deviationist.

On the assumption that your comment is sincere - what would, in your book, be an example of a neutral or even right-leaning newspaper? (I am genuinely curious)

The word everyone is looking for here is "libertarian".

Even that's not a perfect fit, though, as they support things like gun control that would send many libertarians in the US into fits of sputtering rage.

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