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:
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“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)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)