With so many grifters and snake oilers in the security space it must be really hard for the mainstream press to tell what is puffery.
Glad that some other HN-er has also noticed that. I've been an Economist reader for about 15 years now, and lately (the last 3-4 years, maybe?) I've started to notice that slippage you mention.
Among the most obvious cases for me was that "Corbyn as Lenin" front-page [1], which was absolutely disgraceful (if it matters I'm not an UK citizen and I don't particularly fancy Corbyn nor his policies), plus many of their Trump articles have been also pretty disgraceful, at least according to the Economist standards (the comic from one of the latest issues sends Trump directly to the garbage bin? like, what the hell is that?).
For comparison, I find the FT quite unchanged, and that's good.
For an internal publication the economist has definitely slipped. FT under Japanese ownership meanwhile is still quite solid.