280. The Return of Spiderman — in The Economist!

If a citizen of a democracy doesn't have the time or brain to figure all the ins and outs of his country's foreign policy he has to rely on a few newspapers and magazines.  And that, fellow voters, can be ticklish business.  Choose a publication that looks like it will save a busy middlebrow's time most efficiently and you discover that it's slanted, really, toward lowbrows.  With me that was Time magazine.  Pick one that seems the brainiest, and therefore least likely to slant, and you discover that its brains all slant, intellectually, one way.  With me that was the Partisan Review.  (I was equating brains with academic neutrality.  I had to age some.)

Now in old age my three-quarters of a brow counts, for the daily view, on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and, for the larger view, on The Economist, the New York Review, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.  For fill-in and state of the controversy I count on Wikipedia, which tries harder than any of them to maintain academic neutrality.  (See its Guidelines for contributors.) 

With the conservative Journal in there you can see that I'm looking to balance the liberal Economist, particularly in foreign affairs.  But, with the Economist getting more and more emotional about Vladimir Putin that's getting harder to do.  In July they had him on the cover looking out from the middle of a spider web (see Post 253).  Now here he is as a puppet master, the strings from his fingers descending to darkly controlled agents, unseen below.  He's a man ready, as the lead editorial puts it, "to stoop to methods the West cannot emulate without sullying itself" (2/14-20).

I'm getting worked up the way Time used to work me up over the Communists allowed to spread their tentacles all over East Asia. Oh these evil people.  Oh how we need somebody to stand up to them.

But that can't be.  This is The Economist.  How can it be doing the Time magazine thing?  Wikipedia says "it targets highly educated readers."  Its own masthead puts it on the side of "intelligence" against "an unworthy ignorance."  Its brow is higher than anybody's.