Granted. Yet, I think about it this way: They're smart kids that have studied their PPE in Oxford and can write well, but know nothing about issue XYZ, say whether to use tabs or spaces.

But now, the issue comes up, and then they send someone out to visit a conference and speak to people and ask around who the experts in the field are, and (because they're The Economist) get an interview with, dunno, Guido van Rossum and Bill Gates and Woz and Don Knuth and Joel Spolsky and Linus and rms, and hear them out. Maybe throw in a few unnamed senior government officials and ambassadors and so on.

Then they take all their notes and condense it in one page for the magazine, providing some background, explanations, "colour" and the consensus (or factions) in the field.

Sure, if you know the subject in great depth, you'll recognise that it's not written by an expert in the field, and some details may be wrong, and maybe you don't agree with some characterisation. Yet, if you didn't know anything about the subject before, you now know vastly more than before.

I think that's valuable.

There I disagree. When they write on things I know about - like science and tech - they do a far better job of being accurate than most others. They are one of a very few that I don't start by presuming they misunderstand the science, statistics or facts of the matter.

On conclusions, or political consequence, or what should be done there we can agree or disagree. On opinion we can disagree stridently - their stance is not of the right, or simple "capitalist cheerleading", nor of the left, so even there we can agree or disagree surprisingly sometimes.

I know their stance and view - they make it very plain, have run several features explaining it, and even discuss it on their About page. So even when we do disagree on conclusion I find it mostly a rational view from the other side of the fence.

Pick something like The Telegraph to get a "cheerleader for capitalism". It infects everything, even the footie, and damn the facts. If it's science or tech they're very unlikely to have understood. Thirty years ago they were more like the Economist - we may vehemently disagree on some points, agree on others, but their core facts and striving for accuracy were reasonable.