THE MEDIA: The Economist

By profession, Stephen Schwartz is a journalist who now concentrates on the Balkans. He earlier covered places like Central America, which is the principal concern of Tim Brown (see earlier posting on Tim and Steve). He now has a home in Sarajevo. He has the admirable habit of telling editors what he thinks of them:

"The Economist is not infallible. Its correspondents have the absurd habit of lifting and recycling local articles from foreign parts without serious fact checking. They make a lot of minor errors that readers in the big metropolises do not catch. Their coverage of the beginning of the Balkan wars was good but then declined as they decided they were against Western intervention. They tailor facts to fit arguments. I gave up on reading them regularly when they insisted, insanely, on reporting the 1990 Chamorro election in Nicaragua as a racial contradiction between "white" Chamorristas and "dark" Sandinistas. I had a long correspondence with the editor about this. Their excuse was that the goofball they had sent there to report had just come from Africa and that was the context in which he viewed everything. To which I answered, Ok, if you had sent a reporter to Nazi Germany fresh from Mexico would he have reported on Nazi anti-Semitism as a form of rural rebellion a la Zapata?

On the other hand, I stopped reading TIME magazine regularly in 1975..."

My comment: Steve should feel flattered that the Economist answered him. As for recycling and making small errors, none of us is so immaculate as to be qualified the first stone.

Ronald Hilton - 1/10/01