I would say there's been a decline in American media since Bush the younger. As a kid the NYT and WSJ were both quite good. The WSJ sucks off the Republican party and the NYT publishes a bunch of crap. Neither really gets to the root of problems in the country.
For an internal publication the economist has definitely slipped. FT under Japanese ownership meanwhile is still quite solid.
As a kid I couldn't see the political motivations and BS the media was peddling. Rose-tinted corneas slowly fading over time the more I could argue and see nuance.
FT is good. Bloomberg is surprisingly good. I was a regular NYT reader a decade ago and now my go to is Bloomberg. Pro-tip: the “business” wing of any media outlet is better than the “general interest” wing. Presumably business people want have a more vested interest in knowing the truth and not being pandered to.
Bloomberg has gotten things wildly wrong as well; the most obvious example being the "Big Hack" story. I think we all have unrealistic expectations of journalism venues.
All that smoke about hardware supply chain implants and in the meantime someone is analysing all the software items that are widely deployed and have pervasive access... SolarWinds won't be the last.
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.
> For an internal publication the economist has definitely slipped. FT under Japanese ownership meanwhile is still quite solid.
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.