Is “The Economist” Fake News?
About a year ago, while searching for economic data, it occurred to me that the journal “The Economist” was engaging in reactionary click-bait marketing strategies the same as most other traditional broadcast media outlets. In an article on Medium, Jordan Hall explains the role of traditional, legacy media in an academic, social, political, media complex Jordan calls “The Blue Church”. Crumbling under the weight of technological innovation, Blue Church broadcast media are on a kind of cultural Kamikaze mission. “The Economist” is no exception.
This week “The Economist” wrote a hit piece smearing popular YouTube personality Ben Shapiro as an “alt-right sage” and “a pop idol of the alt-right”. Ben Shapiro is an orthodox Jew and vocal critic of ethnic identity politics. In the introduction of Mr. Shapiro’s new book, now number one on The New York Times best seller list for non-fiction, “The Right Side of History”, Ben lambastes alt-right ideology. Innovative YouTube newscaster Tim Pool shows where Ben Shapiro is also a number one target of alt-right harassment. Mr. Pool characterizes the Shapiro hit-piece by The Economist as “one hundred percent factually incorrect”.
Following an angry rebuttal from Mr. Shapiro on his popular YouTube podcast, “The Economist” retracted their idiotic alt-right smear and apologized. In an incomprehensible tweet, senior Economist editor Ann Mcelvoy responded to Shapiro: “Hello Ben — In fairness I think we said [sth] like a figure in Alt-right thinking, but not really a ‘label’”.
Huh?
The tweet has since been deleted. What’s going on here?
Tim Pool’s conclusion is, like most media outlets these days, The Economist’s motivation is financial, using rage bait headlines to attract clicks. Tim additionally worries about citation manipulation to silence critics.
If a journal can successfully label a popular personality they dislike as a bigoted white nationalist, that false label gathers faux validity from subsequent references to the originating journal. Left unchecked, false alt-right click bait on “The Economist” becomes evidence for Blue Church ideologues to then petition internet giants, such as YouTube and Facebook, to ban popular conservatives citing original articles.
The Associated press’s guidelines for journalists defines alt-right ideology as white nationalist, meaning people like the Ku Klux Klan who believe in innate, social and intellectual superiority of certain caucasians. Such believers are a tiny fringe minority in The United Sates. Recall a recent white nationalist summit in Washington DC that attracted twenty-two participants, along with about twelve hundred Blue Church media reporters seeking to keep their false narratives alive.
In an article on Quora, also published on Medium, I describe myself as a Blue Church apostate. Having come of age in a time where we successfully lobbied for civil and social rights legislation, baby boomers like me grew up to populate politics, The Academy and media. I’m not naive, ethnic and gender discrimination still exists. But recent US history shows, where we have had two black Secretaries of State, three woman Secretaries of State and a black President, that systemic racial and gender discrimination is not what it once was. Ethnocentric political strategies of the past are losing validity. Top down flow of Blue Church broadcast media information is being made obsolete by the self organizing collective intelligence of the still somewhat chaotic matrix of information moving around the internet. But Blue Church media, such as “The Economist”, seem to be in a death spiral, vocally declaring any and all whom they deem to be a threat as racist, misogynist, homo-phobic white oppressive louts.
