A Puzzle: The Economist's American Political Coverage

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Economist edition:

Henry Farrell: [P]eople like meself who like to take potshots at [the Economist's] odder articles; we can now be sure that our readers can actually read the original if they click on the link. This piece on the demise of Mark Warner's and George Felix Allen's respective president hopes is a case in point. Most of the article is pretty unexceptionable. The peculiar bit is this summation of the current state of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But whatever the reason, [Warner's] retreat has created a vacuum. He had positioned himself as the centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination and the darling of the party%u2019s liberal activists. Southerners, Westerners and moderates are now shopping for a new candidate, perhaps Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico or Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana or former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the vice-presidential nominee in 2004....

So Hillary Clinton is apparently the "darling of the party's liberal activists."... [T]he only surveys that I know of which try to figure out what "liberal activists" want are the Pew survey (which focuses on Howard Dean supporters) and the Blogpac survey, which draws from a sample of MoveOn email list subscribers.... Pew finds that Clinton polls number 4 or number 3 among former Dean activists depending on which question you look at, while the Blogpac survey finds her to be joint fifth with Joe Biden, and to have higher unfavourable ratings than any other listed candidate. Given that Clinton has specifically tried to position herself as the centrist alternative over the last couple of years, this is about what one would expect. Equally bizarre is the suggestion that centrists might want to gravitate towards John Edwards. This could just be the result of sloppy thinking that telescopes "Southerners, Westerners and moderates" into a unified category, but to the extent that Edwards might appeal to Southerners and Westerners, it's not because he's a moderate. It's because he's running the most economically populist campaign that a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination has run in recent history.

These claims don't seem biased to me so much as clueless. The bit about Clinton in particular strikes me as the sort of thing one might believe if one listened more to Republicans talking about Democrats than to Democrats themselves. I don't get the impression that the article's author actually knows very much about what's happening within the Democratic party. Not what you expect from a serious magazine.

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And in comments:

Crooked Timber Comments: Hasn’t the management of The Economist been clearly turning their magazine into a right-wing rag for a while?... Posted by Barry · October 21st, 2006 at 7:33 am

Barry, I think standards in general at the Economist have fallen in the last decade or so. But it’s really only the American coverage that has moved to the right – or more precisely, to Republican partisanism – rather than just becoming sloppier. I think that this is a deliberate move on their part – they now have many more American readers than UK ones, and they’re generally rich Americans.

Commercially you can’t go wrong by reinforcing the prejudices of rich old men.

Posted by derrida derider

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And the Opinion Mill:

Opinion Mill: Amazing insights from The Economist: Thanks to Atrios and the alert uniformed attendants at Crooked Timber, I see The Economist has taken most of its content out from behind the firewall.

There was a time when I read The Economist regularly, and even paid the premium for a subscription. Then I began to realize that aside from the heftier supply of international news and the absence of the really excruciating fluff pieces Time and Newsweek like to churn out, the Economist differed from its competitors mainly in the fact that it added a letter "u" to certain words. There was also the creeping sense that spores from Fox News had drifted into the Economist's office ventilation system, leading to elevated methane levels and lowered intellectual content in the magazine's reportage on American politics. The attraction of The Economist used to be the sense that it was giving you a view of America from the far side of the ocean. Nowadays, it gives you the sense of having been written from somewhere beneath the ocean, maybe in a suburb of Atlantis....

[George] Allen, we are told, may have been "afflicted by the curse of early popularity." Well, yeah, maybe. On the other hand, he may have been afflicted by his own actions, which as soon as the spotlight hit him showed the world that George Allen is an ignorant buffoon, a neo-Confederate creep and a howling racist who compares dark-skinned people to monkeys and then tells easily exposed lies to smooth things over.

The magazine's lame rundown on Allen can be written off as simple laziness; the summation on Warner, on the other hand, raises deeper questions about where they get their information:

Mr Warner, who served as an extremely popular and successful governor of Virginia until January, insisted there was nothing scandalous involved. Still, his announcement aroused suspicion. Some suggested the salacious. Others wondered if the decision had to do with his vast business interests. But whatever the reason, his retreat has created a vacuum. He had positioned himself as the centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination and the darling of the party's liberal activists...

It will certainly come as news to Daily Kos and other centers of liberal activism that Hillary Clinton is their darling. Most of the lefties I know are exasperated and angered by her suport for the Iraq invasion and her ceaseless tacking toward the dead middle; she is a far-left candidate only in the alternate universe that is home to WingNutDaily and the grifters at NewsMax, where Hillary is second only to Ted Kennedy in the winger demonogy...

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In my view, it's not spores from Fox News infecting an unsuspecting population of Economist writers. In my view, it's a deliberate attempt by Economist management to shape its American political coverage by hiring people who will ape the political coverage provided by the Wall Street Journal editorial page--but, of course, without the coke, the meth, and the acid the Journal's writers consume daily. The assumption appears to be that pleasing the American circulation base and thus keeping the magazine going requires that its American political coverage start with the assumption that various Republican talking points and shibboleths are true, and then heads off into the Gamma Quadrant from there.

This does have costs: it makes me, for one, much less likely to trust or quote what the Economist writes about the rest of the world and about economics and finance than I was two decades ago.

Comments

[wcw]

A reader since my teens, it's my impression that there was been a slow slide in content quality generally since the '80s, accelerating since ~2000.

I let my subscription lapse around 2003, and haven't much missed it. Give me the FT in its place these days.

[Delicious Pundit]

"The assumption appears to be that pleasing the American circulation base and thus keeping the magazine going requires that its American political coverage start with the assumption that various Republican talking points and shibboleths are true, and then heads off into the Gamma Quadrant from there."

I believe that the New York Times -- which wants to be a national paper and wishes to see its blue bags dot the driveways of gated communites near Birmingham, Dallas, &c. -- suffers from a less extreme version of this.

[sm]

I'll make my usual plea. Spend at least as much time on promoting the honest guys with good ideas as you do on calling out the crooks or the deluded.

[HAVH Mayer]

As I recall, The Economist tipped far to the right on American politics in the Vietnam era -- say, '68 to '75. I wonder if they are (this time, anyway) particularly concerned about appearing "anti-American" to their American readership in wartime.

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

Letting the Economist subscription lapse. Goodby, Solong its been sad to see you.

[Fazal Majid]

I remember how they wholeheartedly endorsed Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" in the mid-nineties, going so far as tu refer to it as "our" contract in some articles. I let my subscription lapse at that point, if I wanted Gingrich's propaganda, I would get it straight from the source, thank you very much.

They had cleaned up their act by the late nineties, but backslid around 2002 or so. These phases seem to come and go in waves at The Economist.

[AP]

Wow. I just assumed they meant "alternative centrist" instead of "centrist alternative".

[Dave Parker]

I figure it's been going downhill for at least 25 years. From being one of the few mainstream titles ready to think out of the box, it's just become as shockingly dull as its peers. Even the captions aren't as funny as they used to be.

[jim]

I though the worst passage was:

"Mr Warner . . . insisted there was nothing scandalous involved. Still, his announcement aroused suspicion. Some suggested the salacious."

Subtext: see, it's not just Foley, Democrats have sex scandals, too.

[Bcull]

Subscription lapsed in 2003. Editorials aped the WSJ editorial page, news articles spotty with right-wing talking points and perspective. One the fungus creeps in, how can the remainder be trusted?

[jaywalker]

Still holding on to my subscription, partly from the lack of a serious alternative.

The Economist used to be written for its peers (insider jokes and showing off among the Oxbridge crowd). Standards have slipped and errors creep in (wrong latinisms, less fact checks). Lately, they write for the market and advertizers (see their horrific magazine attempt "intelligent life").

The main problem is not bias. I can live with bias (although the WSJ has gone overboard). The problem is intellectual dishonesty, such as endorsing Kerry and shilling for Bush. Often, the Economist's positions "are not fully thought through". I wonder if this decline is reversible?

[Derelict]

Some 20 years ago, my insisted we subscribe to the economist. We had that subscription for 5 years and I was astonished at how consistently the magazine could be wrong. And not simply wrong in its opinions, or wrong in its prognostications, but simply wrong about the material upon which it was reporting. We finally let the subscription lapse.

In the late 1990s, my again subscribed. Imagine my surprise to find The Economist was still consistently wrong in its reporting, but had become a right-wing echo chamber. Getting more wrong all the time.

Earlier this year, my wife again subscribed. The magazine is now not fit even for bird-cage liner. How it maintains its cache is beyond me, since no one in business can rely on anything it reports, and its opinions are not new or even accurately based. It's like a comic book without a plot or pictures.

[Lewis Carroll]

"Standards have slipped and errors creep in (wrong latinisms, less fact checks)."

A wonderful irony. Should read "Standards have slipped and errors creep in (wrong latinisms, FEWER fact checks)."

Agree with your comment though, j.w. ;)

[jaywalker]

My bad, accept my excuses for mangling the language. Off with his head, silly foreigner ignorant of the intricacies of the Queen's English.

[piotr]

The Economist has its share of decent stories. For example, about inequality and decreasing social mobility in USA. They have very much "ruling class" bias, and they dream about American ruling class that would share the values of the British one. And to a lesser extend, they have the same dream about right wing parties around the world (notable exception include France and Italy). Then there are disappointed when Indian right wing tolerates religious massacres, Polish right wing does not merely look insane, but it is very much insane, and the same goes, alas, for American right wing.

But the world would be so much better if all countries were ruled by right wing parties as resonable as Tories and New Labour. Common sense (at least, their common sense) tells that this should be the case -- parties represented the enterprenourial elite should attract the most educated and the brightest.

So a rightwing politician always starts with an enormous credit of confidence on the part of The Economist, while a leftwing one is always subject of suspicions -- which the latter can alleviate with heroic efforts, like Blair, and the former may squander with likewise heroic efforts.

I still think that there is a place of The Economist in a balanced news diet. Moreover, if you are not a native speaker, it is better for your vocabulary than Time or Newsweek. By the way, what is the deal with Financial Times? Do they have a weekly edition?

[DILBERT DOGBERT]

The daughter got married this weekend and so I spent some time cooped up in a motel room dog sitting. The wife, who pitied my lack of internet access and reading material, brought two Newssqueeks to the room for me to while away the time. God!!! I stopped reading NW a long time ago, same with Time, for all of the reasons listed above. I had forgoten how awful American news mags are. For all the decay of The Economist, it can not compare with the rot, stench and decay of American news mags.

[James Killus]

I've been reading the Economist since it was only an import on tissue thin paper. It's never had good American coverage, although occasionally they'd provide a fresh insight just due to the distance. That's pretty much gone, I suspect because they now have a lot of Americans covering the U.S. and it's pretty hard to find good help on that front these days.

However, their other articles still have a high raw data content that trumps talking points. But even at their best you could never trust their reportage on Ireland, and usually not on India.

More recently, they also have the inevitable problem that they strongly supported the the Bush/Blair war(s), and now that it's all gone to merde, they're trying to pretend that their previous opinions were something other than evil.

[Bupa]

Agree with Dilbert Dobert. The selection of American weeklies is pathetic. The Economist is still the best in the category. I've subscribed for 20 years. I disagree with most who say the secular decline is decades old. There was a dramatic switch in American coverage after 9/11 which betrays its 150 year British Liberal roots. Whatever decline was in the works before then pales in comparison.

Still, who on earth reads the Economist for its American coverage? The bulk of the pulbication is focused on the rest of the world. It carried out a long campaign against Berlusconi. It usually get's it about right in its coverage of usually-uncovered corners of the world, like Macedonia this week.

If Brad can read the WSJ but not its editorial page, why not read the Economist but not its American coverage?

[Aniruddha G. Kulkarni]

Well said, James above.

Yes, they "pretend that their previous opinions were something other than evil."

My guess is that they have always done so. Partition of Bengal (1905), Independence to the countries of the erstwhile empire, assessment of Mahtama Gandhi etc.

Andrew Sullivan called it "a kind of Reader’s Digest for the overclass." By overclass he means America’s corporate elite.
"It’s written in the kind of Oxbridge prose that rips felicitously into one ear and out the other, and it subtly flatters some Americans into feeling that they are sitting in on a combination of an English senior common room and a seminar at Davos,"