Stupidest Magazine Editor Alive?

A correspondent asks me what I think of John Micklethwait as boss of the Economist. I think he may well be a disaster. Look at the kind of stuff he was writing in mid-2003:

Economist.com: Lexington: July 5, 2003: The Hillary factor: IS THERE anything one less wants to revisit than the Clinton wars?... Sidney Blumenthal... Clinton brown-noser... tediously one-sided.... Now the wronged woman herself... who in their right mind wants to be dragged back to Whitewater, the pouting intern or any of the other features of Clintonia, that bitchy, chaotic house party where American politics summered in the 1990s?....

George Bush... has done pretty well by fighting hard for his own team.... Mrs Clinton... has Mr Bush's capacity to elicit frenzied support from her core constituency....

Bush's ability to destabilise her enemies. One reason why liberals can't lay a finger on Mr Bush is that they are just too damn angry to punch straight: read, say, Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times and you are often left worrying less about the commander-in-chief than about the columnist-in-a-tizz....

All this points to the third big similarity between Mrs Clinton and Mr Bush: self-discipline.... There has been a palpable change in the White House's productivity: nobody was better at analysing a problem late into the night than Mr Clinton; but Mr Bush actually gets things done...

Now as of mid-2003, the outlines of the Bush story were already clear: a crew that were very good at politics, but hopeless and hapless at policy. The small-government Republicans were already furious at what Bush had done to spending and the deficit. The foreign-policy realist Republicans were already furious at Bush's diversion of U.S. effort away from the war against Al Qaeda onto the sideshow of Saddam Hussein. The Republicans who knew anything about the Middle East were already furious at Bush's refusal to take postwar Iraqi reconstruction seriously: hope was not a plan. Flotillas of Bush subcabinet officials were telling stories at dinner parties all over Washington about how the underbriefed Bush made seat-of-the-pants decisions--and then would never revisit them no matter how dumb they turned out to be.

Micklethwait knew all this. Micklethwait doesn't claim that Paul Krugman's critiques are wrong--only that they are "shrill." He doesn't claim that Bush's policies make sense or that the Bush White House makes good decisions--only that it "gets things done." He hopes to distract attention from the already-harsh judgments of Bush by the reality-based community by waving the bloody shirt:

Since September 11th, the United States has had more important things to think about...

So why didn't Micklethwait use any of his column inches to tell his readers the real story of the Bush policy clown show that he knew was ongoing in 2003? Was it fear of being cut off by inside administration sources? Was it that he regarded himself as on the Republican side--a cheerleader for the team? Was it that the corporate masters of the Economist had made a decision that their columnists should lean Republican in an attempt to expand circulation among America's upper and overclasses? Was it that he was such a bad judge of sources that he believed the spin of the White House media machine?

I don't know.

Comments

[MaryCh]

Me neither. I largely gave up on The Economist after it endorsed GWB in 2000.

[Geoff]

As a regular reader of the Economist since the late 1980's, it has become clear that something is going horribly wrong with that magazine. I was a social liberal, economic conservative then, and am not much different now, but it has become painful to read almost anything that magazine has published about the US ever since they endorsed Bush for the Presidency. They were horribly misguided then because they failed to see what an incompetent he was before he took office, and they have gone further off course since, no thanks to 9/11. Why they have suddenly turned into apologists for some of the worst political blunders and outright criminality is beyond me. If it werent for the rest of their content, I'd be cancelling my subscription.

[reason]

So they want to make the clown that writes Lexington Boss? I thought they would have him lined up for the sack by now.

It must be option 3 then (going after the Repub Kleptocrats - makes no sense to me there are so few of them. => price rises coming).

I remember writing an angry letter to the Economist about a Lexington piece some time ago when I still was a subscriber. I mean the Economist supported Kerry in 2004, so it isn't everybody there - but to make their worst correspondent boss - unbelievable!

[reason]

I just read the link to Discourse.net - maybe Micklethwait isn't responsible for Lexington after all. I imagine that the US Editor is not responsible for Lexington (just guessing - but is the News Editor responsible for the WSJs Editorials). Any insiders or ex-insiders out there who know the real story?

[david]

It's a horrible magazine, international coverage only slightly better than its US coverage. Mickthlewait rivals Richard Cohen in complacency of mind. I'd say it's a match made in heaven -- he should be the editor -- if so many people who ought to know better didn't slavishly write "as the economist says" before their tiredest class-privilege asserting cliches.

[Henry Farrell]

My understanding is that Micklethwait himself didn't (usually) write Lexington, but his sidekick and co-author Wooldridge did, under his supervision and authority as US editor. I believe that Micklethwait did pen the occasional column himself, perhaps including the piece which Brad mentions above (Brad's contacts in this world are presumably rather better than mine). Either which way, he's clearly culpable for what Lexington has become over the last few years. My suspicion is that Brad is entirely correct in suggesting that this was in part a deliberate ploy to expand US readership (at the least, Micklethwait's appointment as editor in chief was seen as a signal by the board that their best hopes for circulation growth lay in the US market).

[psh]

They continue to use the same old status-based phony upper crust ad message. Only now they're selling views aimed at snake-handlers and lumpen goobers whose major life achievement is being white. They need a new ad campaign.

[Samuel Knight]

I cancelled my Econonmist subscription more than anything because of that sneering Tory-know-it-all tone that pervades all their articles.

That we-know-better air of superiority - even when it's clear that they're just some kid fresh from Oxford who had little or no real insight about what he's writing about.

And what kills me is how that tone is echoed in TNR, NRO, and a few other American publications now.

[++ungood]

I agree with Brad. I was a subscriber to The Economist for about 15 years, but I let my subscription lapse recently. Although there are things that I miss, I can no longer endorse an editorial policy that allows the kind of apologetics that Brad cites above to be published on a regular basis. Fortunately, The Economist's sister publication, the FT, has an international perspective and excellent reporting.

[John Faughnan]

20 years. I started with my first job -- a medical resident. My subscription will not renew this year, last issue is October. Instead I subscribe to The Atlantic and Scientific American. I may consider Newsweek.

It was great once. Fantastic in the 1980s, still strong in the early 90s. Wonderful millenium issue. Alas, the US coverage became flaky in the 90s -- during the Clinton era wit ent completely batty. When they hopped on the impeach Clinton bandwagon it was clear they'd lost it, but I still held out hope fo r a recovery. When Mickelthwaite was appointed editor I knew the waiting time was over.

They stopped being a liberal (19th century) periodical and became a milder version of the WSJ's editorial page. They sold out.

[Geoff]

Wow. So I've not actually gone mad. This is very comforting. I thought perhaps it was I who had changed, but it did not feel to me that I had. The Economist to me, back in the early 90s was just fabulous, and when I first started reading it I couldnt wait for each issue to come out. Now, I get it and wait to see how long it takes me before I want to toss it out the window (usually by the first or second leader.) I know they've been trying to expand their US readership, so obviously they must take the US for a bunch of idiots. Perhaps if readership is expanding they are right. I have to carefully weed through the magazine to get a few tidbits of useful information, but now I feel like I can get that elsewhere and not be exasperated in the process. I pray the same thing doesnt happen to the Financial Times. Perhaps I will not renew my subscription after all. How sad.

[meno]

How odd.

Speaking as a non-American: I've long felt that it's a British magazine with good coverage of global affairs, and surprisingly bad coverage of the US.

But I haven't cared, because why would I read a British magazine for coverage of the USA? Coverage of Japan or Poland or Ghana, sure, great, that's why I read it. I'm not about to read Japanese or Polish or Ghanan papers. But I read a lot about the USA already.

But given that it is read despite its bad US coverage, no because of it, promoting their US editor to editor-in-chief seems a very bad sign.

[derrida derider]

But meno, if you can't trust its coverage of US affairs because you know better, why do you trust it on Japan, Poland or Ghana?

I'm Australian. Like most economists here I'm a strong critic of our government's telecoms policy. This week's Economist covers this (internationally obscure)issue in the form of a 'Face Value' portrait of Sol Trujillo - the CEO of the biggest telecoms company here. Quite simply, it swallows Trujillo's self-interested spin hook line and sinker, to the degree that I can't recognise the major issues. Now I'm wondering how many other countries' coverage simply reflects the spin of the last person their lazy correspondent spoke to.

[Lance Knobel]

Fortunately, there's little reason to think that the FT will go the way of The Economist. There is no corporate relationship: Pearson, which owns the FT, owns 50% of The Economist. Very separate structures, managements, philosophies.

The flip side of that is that The Economist is still very successful both in circulation growth and advertising. The FT is hurting in both areas. That's the threat to the FT's continued excellence, not its cousinship with The Economist.

[piotr]

Perhaps US coverage will improve. US stories from a recent issue:

1. Possible presidential candidates from VA. "Mr Allen, by contast, fancies himself as an anti-tax hawk. The right wing of his party likes that, as it does his opposition to abortion, his difficulties with homosexuals and his near-blind allegiance to George Bush on Iraq."

2. Ridiculous refugee policy, amended with "zero tolerance" of "terrorist groups", including guerillas fighting totalitarian regimes like Myammar.

3. Tony Snow becomes G.W. spokesman, even though he did criticise him, e.g. the he speaks like "a soul tortured with Tourette's". Why? "few people can resist being on the inside of even a crumbling administration ... power ... even if you think that your boss has a bad case of Tourette's."

4. "Dude, where is your library?" Efforts to design presidential library of G.W.B. "Dallas press is gleeful... Steve Blow of Dallas Morning News reckoned that exhibits should include "The Frat Boy Years", "The Failed Bussiness Years", "The Figurehead Baseball Job", "Cool, I'm Governor" and "Holly Crap, I'm President". As for the archives ... he predicts that just about everything will be classified."

5. Lexington. Et tu, Lexingtone? Title: "George Bush fails to defend an inalienable right to cheap petrol."

6. 7. Hypocrisy of criticing Lukashenka and coddling Aliyev, Marijuana as useful medicine.

It seems that when Bush's approval dropped from 35 to 29 percent, Lexington was in those 6 percents.