I do like the economist, but they suffer from a recent graduate syndrome I’ve become increasingly aware of as the blogosphere allows the sort of person who forms the majority of their staff greater access to the limelight, the very convincing on areas you know nothing about, horribly amateurish on areas you are familiar with, concatenate the last three AP reports with a dose of the old Washington Consensus style. It’s a style formed by throwing in enough second hand research that one’s editorially mandated conclusions seem authorative, which can see it in blogs like Lenin’s Tomb. Of the big European weekly don’t-pretend-to-be-unbiased newspapers, I find Le Monde Diplomatique much more useful because it doesn’t rely on that style so much. But the economist is worth reading, and I don’t think the NYT is most of the time, and anything owned by Murdoch certainly ain’t.
Also: the Guardian has a similar attitude to the NYT, with much higher journalistic standards- depressingly, the best in the UK at the moment, purely on the basis that they’ve declined the least out of the respectable papers. Combine that with the Financial Times (which is done by the same sort of people as the economist, but aimed at an audience they actually respect) gives you a decent breadth of coverage. Add in Red Pepper if you want to keep up on the latest labour issues.
I do like the economist, but they suffer from a recent graduate syndrome I’ve become increasingly aware of as the blogosphere allows the sort of person who forms the majority of their staff greater access to the limelight, the very convincing on areas you know nothing about, horribly amateurish on areas you are familiar with, concatenate the last three AP reports with a dose of the old Washington Consensus style. It’s a style formed by throwing in enough second hand research that one’s editorially mandated conclusions seem authorative, which can see it in blogs like Lenin’s Tomb. Of the big European weekly don’t-pretend-to-be-unbiased newspapers, I find Le Monde Diplomatique much more useful because it doesn’t rely on that style so much. But the economist is worth reading, and I don’t think the NYT is most of the time, and anything owned by Murdoch certainly ain’t.
Also: the Guardian has a similar attitude to the NYT, with much higher journalistic standards- depressingly, the best in the UK at the moment, purely on the basis that they’ve declined the least out of the respectable papers. Combine that with the Financial Times (which is done by the same sort of people as the economist, but aimed at an audience they actually respect) gives you a decent breadth of coverage. Add in Red Pepper if you want to keep up on the latest labour issues.