Economist Magazine Adverts Look Like Parodies After It’s American Slavery Disaster

FREE Speech looks to the Economist, a magazine read by business suits and people keen to appear smart and knowing. But the Economist is no leader, no thought provoker. It’s a publication as uncertain as a worm in flip-flops.

The Economist published a review of Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”. The review ends with the line:

Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.

An odd view, for sure. Not all whites supported slavery; but blacks were the enslaved victims.

So. Cue the Twitter mob. Outraged they wrote in.

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Baptist told TalkingPointsMemo: “Maybe this is crass, but I did realize as soon as I read it that this is not actually going to hurt. It has definitely enhanced my Amazon ranking.”

So. What did the Economist do? It became a non review. It was given its own page, so as not to pollute the rest of the ‘newspaper’s’ website. And it is now topped by an apology:

Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologise for having done so. We have therefore withdrawn the review, but in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special page and appears below.

A special page. Blimey. Can this be the same Economnist that has for years advertised it surefootedness and certainty of thought? (Ads via, via, via and).

Every Economist advert is now utter balls. The Economist has been exposed as an organ that will remove anything if enough people complain. How’s that for strong leadership? How’s that for certainty?

Every one of its famous adverts now looks like a parody:

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