The British Economist newspaper published on 6/16/2023, on its website, a negative report on some of conditions in Egypt, including many inaccuracies and lies, in an approach that lacks most professional standards recognized globally and are in forc...
The West has privatized propaganda, like everything else. Economist covers, which I'll cover here, would be laughed at if a government produced them. However, because the ruling class produces them instead of a ruling party, they hide in plain sight. And yet just look at them.
How are these different things? It's not like The Economist even shies away from the dehumanization of entire peoples. Here's their idea of light summer reading, portraying Arabs as ticking time bombs.
As Ghada AlMuhanna . "Millions of Arabs wear shemaghs and iqals as part of their cultural identity. This cover fuels the narrative that anyone that wears these garments are ticking time bombs — that they're terrorists waiting to explode." From Russians to Chinese to Muslims, whoever the enemy du jour is are demonized en masse, a classic propaganda trope.
Even in terms of visual style, Economist covers openly look like propaganda, they overtly copy the same design tropes. This is supposedly ironic, but jokes on you. We generally define propaganda as coming from governments, but this misses the point of who actually rules the West now.
Liberal Democracy™ is simply the branding stamped on the most rank oligarchy. The truth is that elections are just public bribery festivals, the people are kept distracted by cultural circuses, and real economic power remains in the hands of a few elites. In this way, The Economist is simply privatized propaganda for a privatized state.
It is, in short, exactly what it looks like. As George Orwell said in 1984, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." I invite you to just look at The Economist here. It sure looks and sounds like propaganda. Maybe it is what it is.
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Before we get to examples, what is propaganda? Propaganda is often used as a catchword for 'things I don't like'. I certainly don't like The Economist, but let's try to define it more tightly here. The Google/Oxford definition is:
Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
The latter is uncontroversially what The Economist does. As they wrote in 2018:
We were created 175 years ago to campaign for liberalism — not the leftish "progressivism" of American university campuses or the rightish "ultraliberalism" conjured up by the French commentariat, but a universal commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress brought about by debate and reform.
This is most decidedly a political cause and a point of view. A roundly elitist one too. As Alexander Zevin wrote in his , "James Wilson [was] adamant that his journal would aim for the 'landed and monied' and be 'nothing but pure principles. The paper had what one of its later writers saw as an enlightening candour in addressing its readers: you opened it, he observed, to 'hear the bourgeoisie talking to itself, and it could talk quite frankly'." Lenin put it more directly when he called it "a journal which speaks for British millionaires."
