spiritbone

There's a game that's fun to play to see how sometimes ideological and vacuous the Economist can be - try and swap out the key operative term of a piece with something absurd and see if the force of the argument changes or remains persuasive.

This is a while back, and an extreme example, but the pinnacle for me was the editorial (https://postimg.cc/hhkmfgN3) on the 9th of January 2012 where one could swap every reference it had on defending banks and financiers with references to slavery and slaveholders and the force of the argument would not change one jot. This was because it made absolutely no recourse to the wider context of impacts that the industry might have besides being of benefit to a city. It was just a whirr of rhetoric and really opened my eyes to the biases in play. The magazine's prestige has never quite recovered.

Fun aside, many other cases of journalistic bias are more about very selective reporting and emphasis, see for example the Bolivian election of 2020.

It's rather straightforward though for any further away observer; if you're referring to the BLM protests they were clearly embodying a concrete universal in the historical moment, whereas here it is much harder to argue that having been the case.

Moreover, American political movements against vaccination have to my mind without much doubt led to many, many avoidable deaths in the past few years, even if direct causality is harder to establish. So it is not so puzzling or amazing to observe where people's sympathies align at this point of the pandemic.