I Love/Hate The Economist, Part II

And now for the long-awaited follow-up to my previous post in which I declared my intention to embark, quixotic, on a mission to unmask certain fiendish intentions of The Economist and the modus operandi by which it would seek to accomplish them!

In a subsequent post, when I thunder j'accuse!, I will reveal why this humble exercise in muckraking -- or, to coin a phrase, sterilisation by sunlight -- might be considered worthwhile by anyone paying attention to the extent of the media's aiding and abetting of the Bush administration's spectacular failures which we as a nation, long after the rest of the world, are just beginning to appreciate.

But for the moment let us focus not on the mens rea but rather on the actus reus.

Lexington's columns abound with examples of an unfortunate tendency to pander to a certain readership, a bias that can be displayed sometimes subtly, sometimes egregiously. This last week's column is of the more subtle variety: it's the usual tripe in which Lexington lifts the curtain on the supposedly rampant hypocricy of "intolerance" as committed by professed practitioners of "tolerance" on the American left (que the usual stuff about the P.C. police and universities conspiring to exclude different viewpoints, etc.).

A more egregious example of this tendency can be found in "The paranoid style of American politics" (5th January) in which Lexington accuses the American left of transgressions that he/she/it always fails to observe in the right. Here Lexington explains that since the rise of John Birch the "paranoid style", which is defined as "heated exaggeration", "suspiciousness" and "conspiratorial fantasy", has been over the decades appropriated solely and exclusively by the American left.

Lexington seems to have slept through the entire 1990s. Who can explain? Perhaps Lexington failed to notice the relentless attacks on President Clinton -- when the American people were subjected to daily barrages of increasingly outrageous accusations, including petty corruption, murder, drug smuggling and rape -- all of which were false -- and which in many cases were ascribed to imagined plots of Godless liberals. Perhaps Lexington didn't read or hear about William Bennett's "The Death of Outrage" or the myriad other calls to arms that helped ignite the conservative right. Perhaps Lexington was on sick leave when her/his/its own newspaper called for the resignation of President Clinton for, of all things, lying about irrelevant testimony in a civil depostion.

Lexington seems to think it is "paranoid" to expect a congressional a Senate Intelligence panel to investigate a president who can't be bothered to explain why a law such as the FISA statute -- a clearly articulated law intended to protect fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution -- does not apply to him.

It gets worse.

In "Pants on Fire", 19 November 2005, Lexington sniffs, "Mr. Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no [WMD] seems to be a farrago of nonsense." Lexington naturally fails to point out who, exactly, is saying such a thing. Need it really be said this is not even close to the gravamen of the criticism being leveled at the president for his adventure in Iraq or of the way in which he chose to prosecute America's Global War on Unspecified Threats?

In a later post, I'll explain why The Economist's failure to do its job is, like The New York Times's, CNN's and The Washington Post's, so much more imporant than the vacuous and obvious duplicity of Fox and Friends.


Late Update: This weekend's Financial Times Magazine contains a revealing interview (one of their "Lunches with" series) with the departing editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott. Worth reading . . . I detect a hint of contrition, but not near enough, of course.