Economic Information is not Scarce: Strategies for Reading the Economist Using Iser’s ‘Implied Reader’

Abstract

Like other news magazines, The Economist writes with an editorial bias that is exposed through signal words and prior knowledge it assumes of its readers. The Economist, now more popular in its online form with identical content to the print version, has historically had a target audience of educated, wealthy men. As such, The Economist tends to espouse libertarian politics but strays from this position when it is expedient to advancing western influence throughout the world. This research project uses reader-response theory as discussed by literary theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and Louise Rosenblatt to analyze text of The Economist with a focus on the reader’s production of meaning as she interacts with the text. Specifically, this research applies Iser’s theory of the “implied reader” as a means of exploring the unstated details and polarities of a specific article from The Economist. Iser initially put forth this theory in his two-volume The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response and has since modified it himself and modified it through the criticism of other theorists. This research is useful not only for reading The Economist, but also because the analytic methodologies can be applied to various news sources and commentaries.