Substantial Critique: An Editorial Or Commentary From A National Newspaper

The Economist states that “a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it”. As the result, it is impossible to find bylines in its articles or its journalists' real names. The Economist is staffed with economists and journalists who build a tightly-edited, factually diligent account of current events around the world on weekly basis. C.K is a one of The Economist's staff and he speaks with a collective voice in his articles, as a tradition of The Economist. One of his articles is "How political leaders shape public opinion" published in The Economist on Jan 3rd, 2018. I agree with his claim in this article about public opinion, which I have learned in my United State Government class.
In his article, he focuses on American citizens as his main intended audience. He argues about how political leaders in the United States could form public opinion, especially during the current presidential administration. CK claims that "as partisanship grows, committed members of political parties seem increasingly inclined to change their attitudes to match those of their parties’ leaders." In fact, public opinion is defined as a collection of the desires, wants, and thinking of the majority of the people. Probably a few of us do not aware of the strength of the influence from those parties' leaders to ourselves, who can be Democracy or Republican. We might take those attitude changes for a granted. Therefore, it is important to aware that public opinion is influenced by the leaders, who either use the influences properly or not. To prove the influence of the public opinion, C.K effectively provides three specific examples of commonly-discussed topics: Russia, free-trade agreements and domestic economy. He leads the readers from real-life examples to his conclusions without creating any confusion or new concept. His word choice and sentence structure are simple and straightforward and do not imply which side he supports. He speaks with a neutral voice. Sharing a statistic of public opinion about Russia as the first example, CK points out that more Republicans viewed Mr. Putin favorably because of being influenced by their party leader's statement. For instance, in the beginning of 2017, the number is 32% of Republicans, which is 20% higher than that in the year 2015. People might argue that example is political and not enough to say that party members change their viewpoint because of their party leaders. Thus, CK goes on providing other apolitical examples of the free-trade agreement and the United States' domestic economics. For example, in 2009, likely more Republican prefer the free-trade agreement, but "by 2017, Republican support for them had fallen to 36% compared with 67% for Democrats" because their leader, the President, has repeatedly shown contempt for such agreements. In a short article, C.K shares decent amount of statistic numbers as well as researchers' results from reliable sources such as the National Bureau of Economic Research in order to back up his claim. By doing so, he makes his article and his claim factual, bias-free. Lastly, with the example of Trump's supporter's "illegal vote" case, I understand and I agree with him that those parties' leaders should acknowledge their influential and powerful positions and take proper and responsible actions.