[FabHK]

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.

[njepa]

It isn't so much that they get details wrong. As you say they are smart. It is that they won't present the full picture. Sometimes they even do that, but come up with conclusions that aren't supported.

If they for example supported tabs they would end up writing a story how you could attribute the success of Python and Microsoft to tab usage. The quotes and the numbers would be correct and they would make a compelling case, but in the real world the difference would be marginal at best.