Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?

I see this claim in nearly every HN thread about the Economist -- that it's declined in quality.

And it baffles me because, having read it for 20+ years and gone back for research to read plenty of articles from further back... I just don't see it at all.

It's the same market-based, socially progressive, pragmatic international strongly opinionated journalism it's always been. Sometimes I think the way it characterizes something is missing part of the full picture, but it's always been that way. Journalists are fallible humans, they aren't gods, and it's not like there was some mythical past where they always got things right.

I can totally understand people not enjoying it as much as they grow older, simply because you come to mistrust journalism more in general, or shift in your ideological viewpoint so it becomes less agreeable. Readers change.

But I'm getting tired of this trope that it's the Economist that's been changing, that's been getting worse. It just doesn't make any sense. It's the same journalism it's always been. For every article you take issue with, I'm sure you'd find just as many from 20 or 30 years ago.

I suppose it's just part of a general narrative of declinism, how everything used to be so much better and the world is crumbling. But in this case, I just don't see it. You might not like the magazine anymore and that's fine, but I think there's a good chance it's you who has changed, not the magazine.

I know, but I drew the equivalence because both - like so many propaganda organs of the right, left, monarchists, CCP, putinists or any other set of dishonest shills posing as journalists - share in common the defining feature that nothing they say can be trusted to be objective reporting of fact. A perspective would imply an acknowledgement of an external reality, with objective facts, which might then be open to various arguable interpretations. That's not what's presented by either of those outlets; it is, however, what makes the Economist somewhat interesting.

Bending facts, rather than reporting them and then commenting on them, is not "perspective" except in the most recent and/or Orwellian sense of the word.

> When people say that the quality of a publication has declined they often mean they disagree with things that are published.

> a rag like Jacobin

I've been reading The Economist, on and off, for about 17 years. Since about a year or so I've come back to reading it each week, after a pause of a couple of years. I also did notice the same change of quality as you also noticed, and I'm not really convinced that it's only caused by me noticing stuff all of a sudden.

As a specific example, them calling whatever the Trump supporters say about the 2020 elections as the "Big Lie", capitalised, it's something that they wouldn't have done ~10 years ago. I'm talking about the same magazine that had a 3-page mostly congratulatory article on Blair long after the start of the Iraq war (I'd say around 2010-2012). They didn't capitalised any "L-s" in "lies" back then, I'm not even sure they called out Blair as being a liar.

As an answer to your specific question, for the moment I'm also trying out Foreign Affairs. They're even more ideologically one-sided than The Economist, but at least in their case they wear their ideology on their sleeve, so to speak, which makes it more bearable for me to read them. Their book reviews (including the longer "review essays", as they call them) though are less ideologically one-sided, or at least so I found them, and imo they're intellectually worth more than many of the featured articles.

For example the September-October issue has this excellent review called: "Old World Order - The Real Origin of International Relations" [1], commenting on a book called "Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders" [2], which presented the "birth" of international relations via Mongol rule in most of Eurasia starting with the 1200s. In so doing it also makes some passing references to Russians Eurasians like Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Vernadsky or Gumilyov, and what their writings and theories might mean for modern Russia. Really interesting stuff and pretty on point, which stuff I didn't see mentioned in almost any issue of The Economist (where the underlying belief is that the West is fighting the Russian Asiatic Horde, and they leave it at that).

I've also been a FT reader for 20 years, again, with big on-an-off periods, but, the same as with The Economist, I found that their biases have changed quite a lot, in a way that I don't like (there are exceptions, like Martin Wolf, with whom I mostly don't agree on a political level but which has been mostly on point, plus their finance-related reporting is really good, at least for non-experts like me).

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/old-world-order

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/before-the-west/78E4B5C...

I think you have a point... and, furthermore, declinism today is just about the same as it always has been.