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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

Among other things, in the US, the Economist was the only news magazine which covered Africa and Latin America consistently.

If you were literate and interested, after being exposed to the Economist it was impossible to read Time, Newsweek or US News & World Report. It was eye-opening just how bad they were.

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I have been reading the economist for 4+ years now, my primary reason for reading it are having an outside view on the US which delivers a perspective alot of US based newspapers don't have. (I'm based in the US).

In addition they have alot of military/technology coverage and extensive China coverage. US news really did not cover the fact that Xi Jinping is now China's leader for life(2018, which is huge news) the economist wrote several articles about this. They also tend to do pretty well with macro trend analysis and predictions.

Lastly there are no long form/in the weeds articles which I just really don't have time for, think vanity Fair, Atlantic, and the New Yorker.

In the nineties I was targeted by a direct mail campaign they ran on Canadians with the eye-catching title "Un-American", in which then made the pitch that it was a reliable source of world news that wasn't overly dominated by a US perspective. It worked, and I subscribed for a decade.

I was surprised how accurate they were in describing the high-net-worth families in Central America in a recent article:

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/04/03/the-influe...

Not even local media would have been able to describe it like The Economist did.

I suspect that local media might have enough information, but are uncomfortable to write about certain topics. Being seriously disliked by powerful men is sometimes unaffordable to a media outlet.

From the countries mentioned in the article, Honduras might have the least free media.

Right,and the anonymous articles help.

And anonymizing the source too.

US News & World Report in particular was embarrassingly bad, but I felt the worst when traveling abroad and the only US newspaper I saw in some locations was USA Today. What they must think of us.

USA Today was deliberately created as a colorful low-brow but not really tabloid-y paper that, among other places, tended to be the paper of choice to leave outside your hotel room in the morning. My favorite quote about it was something to the effect of: "It's the newspaper for people who find the nightly news too challenging to understand."

I remember USA Today being controversial when it was introduced. Its stories were so short that they often weren't generally continued past the front page, which seemed absurd at the time.

Today many people don't read past the headlines, and the pacing of USA Today seems positively languid and scholarly.

Back in the day when the International Herald Tribune was publishing, I'd read it. It was 8 pages and available at most train stations. It was bits of the NY Times and Washington Post. I don't think it had any original content but the ads were interesting. The USA Today was available but it really wasn't any good.

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