>What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.
Funny, a lot of left wingers would say Economist has a neo-liberal (right wing) bias. It seems the Overton window has shifted the right so far to the extreme that someone like Milton Friedman would probably be considered left wing.
I think they'd argue that they have a consistently liberal "bias" in all subjects, it's just they don't map cleanly onto modern left-right politics. For example they favor deregulation and privatization which are traditional "right wing" stances, while also favoring gay marriage and drug legalization which is an issues that has recently been more championed by the left. The Economist would argue that their stance in both issues is "liberal" thus there being no contradiction.
https://www.economist.com/help/about-us#About_Economistcom
>What, besides free trade and free markets, does The Economist believe in? "It is to the Radicals that The Economist still likes to think of itself as belonging. The extreme centre is the paper's historical position." That is as true today as when Crowther said it in 1955. The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability. It has backed conservatives such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It has supported the Americans in Vietnam. But it has also endorsed Harold Wilson and Bill Clinton, and espoused a variety of liberal causes: opposing capital punishment from its earliest days, while favouring penal reform and decolonisation, as well as—more recently—gun control and gay marriage.