It also has an agenda (basically, globalist, pro-EU etc) which is easy to miss if you are overly-impressed by the intellectual veneer. That said, my favourite Economist contribution to the world of letters is the Big Mac index, which is rather clever.
I've never thought their agenda was subtle, or that they make any attempt to conceal it - The Economist is full of statements like "this magazine has long argued for" or "this would be a mistake" when referring to a policy or idea.
You might not agree with their viewpoint but they don't hide it.
It's the british journalistic tradition: every magazine or newspaper openly establishes the fact that it has certain assumptions, and then argues from there. There is no "unbiased" source when it comes to politics/economics. You'll notice that the pure empiricists do not have opinions on macroeconomics.
It's only in America that certain news organizations pretend to be unbiased arbiters.
> It's only in America that certain news organizations pretend to be unbiased arbiters.
I don't think that's only an American phenomenon. For example, Germany's Der Spiegel is somewhat famous for projecting a neutral/serious/nonpartisan image (though it also gets criticized for that).
Der Spiegel is also a magazine which is famous for a rather strong shift in their agenda. ( And a somewhat good example for the dangers of not declaring a policy viewpoint of a news source. )
While it may be true that it's impossible for a newspaper to be completely unbiased, that doesn't mean this is not the ideal they should strive to. Just like it's not possible to have completely bug-free code, but you shouldn't give up fixing bugs because of that. If engineers assumed from the get go that their code will be buggy, that would simply mean lowering their standards, giving themselves an excuse to be lazy. I imagine it's similar with news organizations, if they set out to provide biased reporting, then they will be happy to gloss over or justify much more glaring abuses of reason than if objective information was their goal.
Anecdotally, I see this opinion (that unbiased reporting is impossible, so why not have journals be openly partisan) mostly coming from people who themselves hold pretty extreme political views. It's almost as if the level of liberal/conservative bias they feel most comfortable with was so high that they couldn't pretend, even to themselves, that their sources are objective, and they deal with the cognitive dissonance by saying that it's OK since no source is completely objective.
But American media takes it to the absurd. Every article becomes unchewable piece of "he said, she said" you have to fish out fact from with the microscope. They can't say "day was sunny", they would say, "Joe Farmer said that the day was sunny after observing it for few hours".
It's entirely possible to have completely bug-free code, that's how we have complex systems that work, including planes that don't fall out of the sky (some of this is based on formal proofs and verification, expensive but it can me done). Further, the assumption that your code will be buggy (at some point) is not a lowering of standards but crucial to ensuring that you're vigilant in both analysis and testing.
Having said all that I think the code is a poor analogy, as where a function or module usually has an agreed correct behaviour or outcome the same is not often true in the real world, and the things that get reported on are often those that are most disagreed-upon.
Yes, but the situation is reversed in television/radio news: the BBC is a pillar of objectivity, and the US market is dominated by cable news talking heads yelling at each other.
I don't know about that, the biased stuff is pretty obvious.
For example, they ran a cover article a few months back about the poor helpless souls in the City of London and how the big bad bankers from other places were challenging them. I found myself laughing at one point.
They are the best source of international news. My biggest issue with it is that reading it is time-consuming, and the weekly cadence is relentless.
I'm not really talking about the 'biased' stuff - they take anonymous contributions from all kinds of people so there are bound to be articles that one considers biased, simply because of this. What I'm referring to is a subtle pro-globalist agenda which contributors from all political backgrounds can unite around. The archetypical UK example is the pro-EU Conservative/mainstream Lib Dem/New Labour group that considers national politics to be a parochial irrelevance to be replaced by supranational institutions. The embodiment of this group is probably (now Lord) Peter Mandleson.
They don't take anonymous outside contributions, as least, not without putting their name in the byline (rendering the anonymous bit incorrect); they do publish their articles under pseudonyms -- like Babbage, Bagehot, etc. -- or initials only, as they feel the article and author represent the entire magazine and not just the views of the journalist who wrote the piece.
