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Comment by robk | Hacker News Reader

In the past five or size years the Economist has sadly become quite partisan and unreadable..in their trump derangement they've lost a lot of the even keel view they'd previously had over the prior decades I'd been a reader. Sadly I still read but effectively skip all politics as the new Eric Schmidt led board have certainly co-opted the formerly drier view the editors formerly would have taken in exchange for a more activist view which is far out of character for them. Sad because it was once a must read end to end to years for me. Now it's a skim for 35-45% unique content type of publication.. No one else covers the breadth of intriguing topics like African politics but the anti Brexit UK and anti Trump US political angle ruins most of the other content for the major western economies.

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Agree (though I dropped the Economist a bit earlier). The Financial Times has followed the same path unfortunately. I was a long time reader (15y+) and it used to be pretty austere and reliable (good things in my opinion) but in the last few years it has become pretty much a gigantic opinion piece, with all articles biased to push a narrative. I know people around me who also cancelled their subscription for similar reasons (I am happy to pay for news but have no interest in paying for propaganda).

Will you also stop reading Nature, Scientific American, and The New England Journal of Medicine? The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of scientists, academics and journalists is horrified at the anti-intellectualism, brutality and outright lack of decency demonstrated by the american administration.

The Economist does a good job of judging each case on its merits. A socially liberal, pro free-trade publication taking issue with Brexit or the actions of Donald Trump seems perfectly consistent. Fully in keeping with its heavily “partisan” coverage of the USSR in the 80s & 90s, the regime of Robert Mugabe later on or the current perspective on the CCP.

Not that one counter example refutes your whole point, but I found the analysis of his record (this week’s edition) to be rather clear-eyed.

I do agree that I’ve noticed a tinge of bias that didn’t seem there before, but to represent it as more than slight is incorrect based on my experience (been subscribijg for ~12 years)

>>> The bulk of the analysis covers the period from 2017, when Mr Trump took office, to the end of 2019. We stop in 2019 in part because some data are released only annually, and in part because the pandemic has turned economies across the world upside down. Our conclusion is that, in 2017-19, the American economy performed marginally better than expected. (That conclusion remains if we follow the practice of some political economists, who argue that the influence of presidents on the economy can be discerned only after a year in office, and limit our analysis to 2018-19.)

I enjoy reading The Economist and I’m glad that I’m able to filter out their editorialism from the facts. I think it’s easy to do due to their combination of forthrightness and writing style, plus my own ability to cut through the BS that I’ve worked hard to sharpen over many years.

The one thing I dislike about The Economist is their cover art. I grew to strongly dislike having some caricature of Trump or nuclear blasts staring me in the face all the time. Something something “living rent free in my head.” Except I was paying rent by paying the subscription.

I just want the information, and I’m happy to pay for it! But I reached a point where I couldn’t justify handing over that much money to them any more because it was unsettling having these images barge in at me every delivery or every time I took it out of my bag to crack it open. And they use the same lines other rags do: “if you read the economist, you’ll be informed, and to be informed is to be safe... now look at how the world is going to hell!” I felt like I was being negged as a subscriber.

There is a place for these works of art, I just wish it could be in the letter from the editor or one of their columns, all of which I appreciate.

The problem is that most biased articles aren’t using outrageous headlines or pushing false and/or improbable facts. Most of the bias happens by simply omitting the facts that go against the narrative. No critical reading of the article will give you the missing facts. You kind of need to read away from biased newssources. Or read both sides on every topic.

Agreed. Any more, I struggle to find a single publication that even tries to do both.

Their letters section does a nice job at backstopping them in that regard.

I’d love to see some examples of flagrant omissions gone unchecked.

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