Subliminal messages from The Economist?

I like The Economist. It has really good writing, and, although it's obscenely expensive, in the last few years it's been a good way to escape the narrowness and GOP-talking-point-drivenness of most American news media.

Also--let's be candid--I like them because they're increasingly antagonistic toward the Bush administration, which shouldn't be surprising from a publication that describes its mission as to "take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." (Not surprising, at least, from a publication that actually means talk like that. Are you listening, Washington Post?)

Case in point: From their weekly email news summary in my inbox this morning, here's their blurb about Andrew Card's resignation:

Now Card was the Chief of Staff for five years. He surely participated in hundreds and hundreds of photo-ops with the President. And of that photographic trove, there must be a lot of photos of him appearing, metaphorically, to have the President's ear.

But look at the one they picked. In case it's cropped too much to recognize, here's another photograph, slightly different angle, from the same moment:

Yes, it's the moment--for many, the defining one of the Bush presidency--on the morning of September 11, 2001, when Card temporarily interrupted Bush's reading of The Pet Goat to a Florida elementary school class, to inform him that the US was under attack--after which, Bush returned to reading to the class for another five minutes.

All the available photos of Card and Bush, and they went for that one. Hmm.

But then, as I mentioned, The Economist has gone increasingly sour on All Things Bush; it supported his 2000 campaign, but in 2004 it supported Kerry. And it's called for the resignation of Rumsfeld. And, one could argue, the souring began pretty early on; here's a web ad that I screen-captured in mid-October 2000 (sorry about the image quality, but in 2000 I didn't know what a blog even was):

When I first dug this image out on my hard drive this evening, I thought for a moment that I'd found yet another "Pet Goat" photo, although the time-stamp on the file indicates we're looking at Candidate Bush, not President Bush. And yet, once again, The Economist was running a photo in which he's evidently reading a children's book. And that time, of course, it's in a context that's evidently not even trying to be fair-minded. (Or at least certainly it doesn't read that way to me.)

Kind of makes you wonder how much they pay--or if they even have to pay--their photo editors.

Oregon angle:

The Pet Goat is part of a reading mastery series co-authored by Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann, professor of education at U of O. (The pet goat in question, according to comments at a press conference, is also "from a farm in rural Oregon.")