The Atlantic

The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher based in Washington, D.C. It features articles on politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston as The Atlantic Monthly.

Beneath all of its high-minded rhetoric about democracy, free expression, fearlessness, and American ideals is a vehicle of center-right pablum, designed to launder reactionary opinions for a liberal-leaning audience. ~ Nima Shirazi

Quotes

• While it presents itself as a magazine of ideas—which makes readers feel as if they are engaging intelligently with important issues—it in fact covers those issues in such a superficial and slipshod way that people are liable to be left with a worse understanding of the issue than when they went in, though they may be wrongly convinced that they have learned something. ... Its editors allow writers to make unsubstantiated claims, ignore contrary evidence, and use sloppy reasoning. As a magazine editor myself, I am appalled that nobody at the publication would even think to ask a writer to deal with the opposing arguments or provide actual evidence. ... You are just as likely to come away from an Atlantic article with your head full of propaganda and distortion as you are to come away enlightened.
  • Nathan J. Robinson, "The Worst Magazine In America," Current Affairs September 13, 2024

• David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, a lot of these other people make you understand what their job actually is. So the naive might believe that the job of journalists is to try to find out the truth and tell other people about the truth. And if that were the case, obviously, their careers would have been ended by their catastrophically wrong statements and claims before the war. So, that would be if that were their job to find out the truth. If their job was to start wars, then obviously, they would be promoted. And we know what happened. And so, that tells us a lot about what their jobs actually are.
  • Jon Schwarz, "How The Atlantic Magazine Helps Sell Austerity and War to Middlebrow Liberals," Citations Needed, March 13, 2024

• Beneath all of its high-minded rhetoric about democracy, free expression, fearlessness, and American ideals is a vehicle of center-right pablum, designed to launder reactionary opinions for a liberal-leaning audience. As the employer of warmongers like Jeffrey Goldberg, Anne Applebaum, and David Frum, under the ownership of a Silicon Valley-tied investment firm hellbent on destroying teachers’ unions, The Atlantic magazine, time and time again, proves a far cry from the truth-pursuing, consensus-disrupting outlet that it so often claims to be.
  • Nima Shirazi, "How The Atlantic Magazine Helps Sell Austerity and War to Middlebrow Liberals," Citations Needed, March 13, 2024