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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Better reporting: Respondents wanted journalists to spend their time investigating powerful people and providing depth rather than chasing algorithms for clicks. Employing more beat reporters who were true specialists in their field was another suggestion for improving trust.

I'd like this to be true but it seems very trivially not. Not in the sense that most people wouldn't say this, I don't doubt that at all, but they are either lying or have no self-knowledge. If people wanted depth they would be deserting popular 'mainstream' news for the most high-brow alternatives, not the worst social media slop. If they wanted to they could even just go and pick up a copy of the Economist and become part of the most well-informed 5% of the public on world news, but they don't.

HACKER: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is. HUMPHREY: Prime Minister, what about people who read The Sun? BERNARD: Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits.

These people do not generally trust that the Economist is where well-informed people are. That's what widespread loss of faith in institutions looks like.

Fine, but I simply don't believe anyone goes to social media because they think that's where the informed people are, they just can't be bothered to read. 95% of people wouldn't even have the basic knowledge with which to begin questioning something they read in the Economist.

The Economist isn't particularly highbrow either. Kind of mid-wit for just recycling consensus takes with branding. Very much in the middle of the low-mid-high IQ meme.

To be honest, though, everything is midwit if you’re an internet snob like you and me, Dean. Bellingcat? The ultimate midwit NAFO publication. The London/NY/Paris Review of Books? Catastrophically midwit zine read by aging socialists of the kind who use The Guardian’s dating platform and chuckle at another lame Trump nickname at dinner parties. The New Yorker? Vanity Fair? Magazines for parents of Juilliard students, nought more need be said. The popular substacks or newsletters (unaffiliated or affiliated) of erstwhile online political commentators (Iglesias, Sullivan, Klein)? Soothing balm for dull, aging millennial and GenX centrists upset at a world they no longer understand. More obscure commentator figures (Yarvin, Kriss)? Slightly more verbose Twitter bait dressed up for the audience of clapping chimps paying $5 a month to chuckle gently while pretending to do their email job and thinking themselves above the worker ant masses consuming their cyber slop.

In the end, the choice is between the last few good blogs (never read the comments), the intelligent but supremely annoying autists at HN and LW (but only on topics they know something about), prediction markets, a few good bank and third party research analysts if you can get access through your company, some columnists that agree with your personal biases at major publications and this place.

I love you and @BurdensomeCount's fun elitist views. Not elitist in a negative way, and you both seem to really mean it! It's quite enjoyable.

What are some of the last few good blogs?

Scholar's Stage though he mostly focuses on running a professional China centre these days.

NS Lyon? Apparently now discontinued.

Wyclif's Dust?

Thanks! Yeah already follow Lyons (he's Orthodox btw!) and the Wyclif guy looks interesting. Subbed to him.

Assuming that the advertisers know what they are doing, the Economist readership is about as highbrow as you can get. If you ignore the filler (i.e. the articles) and focus on the paid-for content (i.e. the ads) there are far more yachts, Rolexes etc. in the Economist than in Tatler.

No, The Economist’s readership has a substantial number of students and juniors, plus interested normal people who like to imagine themselves as the kind of person who reads it, many of whom don’t have a lot of money. It’s largely the magazine for the back office. FT Weekend’s readership is likely wealthier, because it’s mainly older print readers of the paper who have some money (students and juniors on the app aren’t going to care to read it).

Tatler’s readership is bifurcated between that sub-group of rich Arabs and Asians (they have a big audience in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Gulf) who enjoy the Anglo aesthetic, are often involved with polo, ride, have country houses in England, that sort of thing, and the residual English upper and upper-middle classes, some of whom have money and some of whom don’t. That niche means Tatler’s ads are more targeted, although there is still plenty of Patek and Lori Piana. Bien pensant PMCs might read that awful Air Mail or even worse Monocle, which also have all the Rolex and Porsche ads.

I mostly think of the Economist as 'that magazine which is read by my friends who think that running a country would be easy if you could make everyone take an economics course'. It's Oxford's PPE degree between glossy covers - that particular arrogance engendered by a very wide purview and not-quite-deep-enough subject knowledge.

That's why I said 'even'. Anyway the thing is you have to actually understand the consensus to know why you're against it. People aren't avoiding the Economist because they have considered and rejected the sort of mainstream centre/centre-right arguments it advances about given issues, they just find the things it writes about boring.

low-mid-high IQ meme.

I would bet my house on the IQ of the average Economist reader being higher than that of the average consumer of almost any new media/social media outlet/person with a non-trivial following.

What paper/magazine is highbrow then?

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