Criticism
In 1991, James Fallows argued in The Washington Post that The Economist suffers from British class snobbery, pretentiousness, and simplistic argumentation, and "unwholesomely purveys smarty-pants English attitudes on our shores". He also accused it of an editorial line often contradicted by the news stories.
In 1999, Andrew Sullivan complained in the New Republic that it uses “marketing genius” to make up for deficiencies in analysis and original reporting, resulting in “a kind of Reader's Digest” for America’s corporate elite. While Sullivan did acknowledge that the magazine's claim about the dotcom bursting would probably be accurate in the long run, the bubble would not burst in the US market until 2001. Sullivan also pointed out that the magazine greatly exaggerated the danger the US economy was in after the Dow Jones fell to 7,400 during the 1998 Labor Day weekend and noted that the magazine's claim that the US economy was at a high risk of entering a recession was far from clear. He also said that The Economist is editorially constrained because so many scribes graduated from the same college at Oxford University, Magdalen College, which he described as "a somewhat ineffective system for correcting internal flaws in a global magazine." The Observer wrote that "its writers rarely see a political or economic problem that cannot be solved by the trusted three-card trick of privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation."
In 2008, former editor of Newsweek Jon Meacham, a self described "fan", criticised The Economist's focus on analysis over original reporting.
Read more about this topic: The Economist
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)