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Comment by derevaunseraun | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the point of "staying informed" wasn't to have the news inform our everyday decisions but just to have something to talk about.

Imo "good news" is the kind that tells us stuff we hadn't known prior in a way that isn't overtly sensationalist. It's dry and informative, at the cost of being entertaining. There aren't many outlets that actually do this.

It's also kind of ironic (and telling) seeing this type of article come out of Wired. You wouldn't see this kind of article in an outlet like the Economist

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I agree with you, it is interesting this came from Wired.

But I have a strong personal bias against the Economist, and I feel like you used it as an example of a more serious journalist-y news.

I feel that the Economist is resting on its historic good name but has become a simple liberal rag that people use as a virtue signal. It's a terrible news source, incredibly and unabashedly biased, and the only time I have ever heard of it has been in Washington DC where only the most insufferable people smugly declare they read it cover to cover.

I would humbly submit better outlets like The Week, Barron's, or maybe Quanta.

I’d like to understand more about the perception that the Economist is a liberal publication. I’ve heard this before and it’s hard for me to reconcile this view with the articles I read. In my opinion, the economist more often than not errs on the side of being comprehensive and including facts that may or may not be relevant. Some of those facts may point to liberal conclusions, sometimes not.

I also know that they’ve taken a strong conservative stance on gender-specific sports. If they were “unabashedly biased” that would not fly.

"From its beginnings in 1843, when The Economist newspaper was founded by a Scottish hat manufacturer to further the cause of free trade [...]" [0]

It is liberal in the classical sense and in my opinion this was quite transparent in the writing at least when I was a subscriber throughout the 2000s.

[0] https://www.economistgroup.com/about-us

> I feel that the Economist is resting on its historic good name but has become a simple liberal rag that people use as a virtue signal.

You mean liberal as in economically liberal or liberal as in woke liberal? The magazine doesn't really publish a lot of the latter type of content, but I can definitely imagine people flexing the magazine out of snobbishness (kind of like the New Yorker). But that's a different kind of virtue signal

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