I don't know what is happening to the Economist magazine--a magazine that I have described as the "best magazine there is"--but since the beginning of the Arab uprising, the magazine in its coverage of the Arab world has lost its distinctiveness. It now reads very much like any US newspapers and sometimes even more crude in its services to the political agenda of the Saudi camp in the region. This article in the Economist on Lebanon could have been produced word-for-word as a press release by the Hariri family.