Apart from Austin Powers, there can be few British institutions as groovy right now as The Economist. Der Spiegel has hailed its “legendary influence.” Vanity Fair has written that “the positions The Economist takes change the minds that matter.” In Britain, the Sunday Telegraph has declared that “it is widely regarded as the smartest, most influential weekly magazine in the world.” In America, it is regularly fawned on as a font of journalistic reason. Anthony Lewis has referred to it in more than 50 columns in recent years, deferring to The Economist on such diverse subjects as tax cuts, Patrick Buchanan, medical marijuana, tort reform, Bosnia, East Timor, Middle East peace, Bob Dole, and mandatory-minimum sentences. Bill Gates has boasted of reading it cover to cover. According to the magazine’s media kit, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, has remarked: “I used to think. Now, I just read The Economist.”
And you can see why the magazine has earned such shagadelic plaudits. At a time when other newsmagazines are falling over one another to put models, movie stars, and diet pills on the cover, The Economist still doesn’t shrink from a 20-page report on Indonesian banks or a sassy take on the Nigerian economy. No other newsstand magazine could seriously hawk the headline: “Telecommunications: A Survey.” And, as a weekly compost of world news and economics, it’s very hard to beat—a kind of Reader’s Digest for the overclass. It’s written in the kind of Oxbridge prose that trips felicitously into one ear and out the other, and it subtly flatters some Americans into feeling that they are sitting in on a combination of an English senior common room and a seminar at Davos. Besides, it’s hard to dislike a magazine that can run a photo of the pope meeting with Bill Clinton over the caption: “That’s 1,000 Hail Marys.”
And you can see why the magazine has earned such shagadelic plaudits. At a time when other newsmagazines are falling over one another to put models, movie stars, and diet pills on the cover, The Economist still doesn’t shrink from a 20-page report on Indonesian banks or a sassy take on the Nigerian economy. No other newsstand magazine could seriously hawk the headline: “Telecommunications: A Survey.” And, as a weekly compost of world news and economics, it’s very hard to beat—a kind of Reader’s Digest for the overclass. It’s written in the kind of Oxbridge prose that trips felicitously into one ear and out the other, and it subtly flatters some Americans into feeling that they are sitting in on a combination of an English senior common room and a seminar at Davos. Besides, it’s hard to dislike a magazine that can run a photo of the pope meeting with Bill Clinton over the caption: “That’s 1,000 Hail Marys.”
It’s also, as a former high-level staffer puts it, “fantastically profitable.” Last year, according to The Economist’s editor, Bill Emmott, it raked in close to $40 million in profits, unheard of in serious magazine journalism and only slightly more than what The New Yorker was recently rumored to be losing. Packed with luxury-goods ads and corporate image advertising, one in three of its American readers is a millionaire, and one in two is in top management with an income of more than $100,000. Its circulation has risen from 300,000 in the mid-’80s to close to 700,000 today, with more than 300,000 in the United States. (Although it is still referred to by Anglophiles as The Economist of London, its British readership is roughly one-sixth of its total.) At a subscription price of $125 per year for a black-and-white magazine, its marketing success is unparalleled.
But there’s a funny thing about The Economist. The closer you look, the weaker it gets. Beneath the shrewd blizzard of one-liners, Oxford Union ripostes, and snazzy graphs, the little secret of The Economist is that it actually contains less original reporting than many other newsmagazines, relies heavily on amateur stringers for write-ups of other news sources, and, when it comes to its vaunted analysis, has shown a remarkable capacity over the past couple of years to be demonstrably wrong. As its circulation grows apace—it was one of the five fastest-growing magazines in America last year— and its reputation expands even further, the marketing genius of The Economist has become more and more out of line with its journalistic ordinariness.
Weekly newsmagazines, of course, are not an easy venture. At a time of proliferating sources of information and the punditization of news, the project has become even more elusive. The difficulty lies in summarizing a week’s events in the entire world in a way that is actually interesting and informative to a reader who might have read at least one daily newspaper, surfed the Web, or watched a fair amount of cable in the previous seven days. One approach is to rewrite the news as idiosyncratic editorials, the kind of thing some opinion magazines aim for. Another is to report the news more deeply and coherently than other media, as other newsmagazines are supposed to do. Another still is to find stories that appear nowhere else, or to specialize in one area and cover it exhaustively.
Unfortunately, The Economist does a little of each of these things but none of them very well. It has a far smaller reporting and editorial staff than other newsmagazines, so it relies predominantly on other news outlets and stringers for its rewrite of the week’s news. It covers international affairs far more comprehensively than other magazines, so it spreads its wealth even more thinly than most. (It has, for example, one correspondent for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.) Its opinionizing is largely reserved for its opening editorials, which vary from the glib to the acute but make up a tiny fraction of its pages. And, although it occasionally finds nuggets of stories that do not appear elsewhere, they tend to be of the abstruse variety and add more detail than depth. As Bill Emmott dryly remarks, “Sometimes we do add hard fact, but that isn’t our principal appeal.”
Take its weekly survey on the United States, a perfect example of The Economist’s strange allure. It’s a section designed to sum up the United States in a way no one else does. But a randomly picked recent issue—April 10—shows how implausible an objective this is. The section led with a summary of how Republican candidates had responded to the Kosovo crisis, the premise being that reactions to Kosovo could be “a pre-primary electability indicator.” The piece itself replayed much of the week’s newspaper reporting (a quick detour through Nexis shows that nothing new had been added by the magazine) but then turned around and argued that none of it really mattered, since money and domestic issues would likely decide the Republican campaign. This was the lead item. News on hate crimes and employment were squeezed into a couple of hundred words, USA Today-style. A small piece on the election of a Green Party candidate in Oakland was better reported in The Washington Post almost a week earlier, and the final “Lexington” column was a thumb-sucker on the U.S.-China relationship on the eve of the visit of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji. The columnist’s take? “The public spin for Mr. Zhu’s trip may yet prevent it from becoming a public relations disaster for both sides. Yet the visit may, in hindsight, mark the symbolic point at which ‘strategic partnership’ became ‘strategic competition.’” Only time would tell.
In addition, one lengthy piece summarized a report on Chicago urban planning but added scant political or cultural context. Another story detailed a spate of grave robberies in New Orleans, and another mentioned the environmental pressures on the prairie dog. Each of these last two pieces was a classic “stringer” piece, replete with a few colorful moments and scantily reported elsewhere. But, given their trivial content, it is not hard to see why.
So what, one wonders, is the purpose of the American survey? It’s not a heavy read, and it has the usual jolly captions and photographs (a classic is a picture of a bird of prey on the White House lawn with the caption: “One Hawk In The White House, At Least”). But it can scarcely tell anyone in America anything significant that he or she didn’t already know. It has no original take on the news, except a tone of whimsical condescension, and it adds no significant new reporting to what a brief ruffle through a couple of newspapers could easily provide. This is hardly surprising since The Economist employs a total of seven full-time reporters to cover the United States.
The only plausible purpose of the survey is therefore to inform readers outside the United States of what is going on inside the United States, if they happen to care about prairie dogs. Bill Emmott even argues as much, saying that brief news summaries for expatriates is, in fact, one of the magazine’s strengths. That’s why the editor of the U.S. survey is, oddly enough, in London. “The fact that we’re from the outside from a relatively unimportant country means we have an extra piece of credibility,” he explains. Rough translation: We’re right because we’re British.
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