Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I was a regular subscriber to the Economist - when it was published in the U.K. It was then a moderately conservative publication by European standards and more to the right, by U.S. standards, than the two major U.S. news weeklies - Time and Newsweek. That began to change and increasingly so, year after year, since they moved their headquarters to New York City and now employ more of their staff there than anywhere else. Increasingly, it has become less intelligent of a publication and more of its "news" reports are simply editorials masquerading as news.
When it attempts to juxtapose its proclamation that: "Republican fortunes have sagged across the nation—in no small part because of the Bush administration's failure to cope with Hurricane Katrina's devastation" with its report that the winner in the race for governor, Republican Jindal refused "to make a fuss even when Republicans there were blaming New Orleans for Katrina";
the Economist is simply ignoring basic facts and not even asking a more obvious editorial question, which would be:
"Maybe, in electing the Republican, Mr. Jindal, the people of Louisiana had a greater understanding of the problems surrounding Katrina than did the media, which ignored the vast extent to which local and state officials held the greater share of responsibility for those problems than did the federal government."
My thoughts exactly.