{"id":41952,"date":"2018-12-24T12:37:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-24T17:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41952"},"modified":"2018-12-24T12:37:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-24T17:37:18","slug":"the-curious-case-of-the-economist-how-it-manipulates-its-readers-with-slanted-comment-on-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41952","title":{"rendered":"The Curious Case of The Economist: How It Manipulates Its Readers with Slanted Comment on Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/p>\n

The Curious Case of The Economist: How It Manipulates Its Readers with Slanted Comment on Russia<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n

The Economist<\/em>\u00a0magazine is an admirable\u00a0publication<\/a>\u00a0to which I have subscribed for over fifty years, with gaps now and then. While serving in Vietnam in 1970 its weekly arrival was a major event, as we were bereft of sensible reportage about that disastrous war, and I have always considered it to be balanced, extremely well-informed, and accurate. In its own\u00a0modest words<\/a>\u00a0\u201cWhat ties us together is the objectivity of our opinion, the originality of our insight and our advocacy of economic and political freedom around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quite so. And so say all of us. Let\u2019s hear it for a fearless journal that tells it like it is.<\/p>\n

Until it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

In the issue dated December 15, 2018 there is a strange anomaly in its description of life in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a shattered African state which the magazine\u2019s writer(s) criticise objectively and with originality. And it\u2019s the originality tangent that is intriguing.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0hard copy<\/a>\u00a0which I received in France has a half-page leader about Congo, headlined \u201cThe Kremlin-style charade in Kinshasa \u2014 Can anyone stop Joseph Kabila from doing a Putin?\u201d<\/strong> which was an arresting summons that indicated objective cover concerning what one might expect to be a series of parallels and comparisons involving the leaders of Congo and Russia. On reading it, however, I wondered if perhaps the writer(s) had trended to originality that transcended objectivity, so went to the\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0where the headline was slightly different, employing the tried and faithful \u201c-ology\u201d tack-on and omitting Kabila\u2019s name. It read \u201cKremlinology in Kinshasa: Can anyone stop Congo\u2019s president from doing a Putin?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Curious Case of The Economist: How It Manipulates Its Readers with Slanted Comment on Russia The Economist\u00a0magazine is an admirable\u00a0publication\u00a0to which I have subscribed for over fifty years, with gaps now and then. While serving in Vietnam in 1970 its weekly arrival was a major event, as we were bereft of sensible reportage about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12435,2413,462,927,14309,694,9620,857],"class_list":["post-41952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-brian-cloughley","tag-democratic-republic-of-congo","tag-journalism","tag-manipulation","tag-objectivity","tag-russia","tag-the-economist","tag-vladimir-putin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41953,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41952\/revisions\/41953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}