Secondo Henry Farrell gli editoriali dell'Economist - gli esempi sono tratti dalla copertura delle presidenziali francesi del settimanale di St James Street - sono sempre più simili a un'editoriale della Pravda durante il regno di Andropov. Naturalmente una Pravda in versione pro-market. O al risultato di un generatore di editoriali dell'Economist.
[...] It’s as beautifully resistant to the intellect as an Andropov era Pravda editorial. A few more years of this and the Economist won’t have to have any human editing at all. Even today, I imagine that someone with middling coding skills could patch together a passable Economist-editorial generator with a few days work. Mix in names of countries and people scraped from the political stories sections of Google News, with frequent exhortations for “Reform,” “toughminded reform,” “market-led reform,” “painful reform,” “change,” “serious change,” “rupture,” and 12-15 sentences worth of automagically generated word-salad content, and you’d be there. I wonder whether even the writer of this editorial would be able to define ‘reform’ or ‘change’ if he were asked, beyond appealing to some sort of ‘social protection bad, market good’ quasi-autonomic reflex embedded deep in his lizard brain. I also wonder whether the people in there are as cynical about their product as Andropov-era journalists were, or whether they actually believe the pabulum they dish out.
Crooked Timber