The Economist Magazine Cover For 05/0/2024

The Economist Read in browser MAY 4TH 2024 How we chose this week’s image SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image Insert a clear and simple description of the image Edward Carr Deputy editor We had two covers this week. In most of the world we featured our interview with Emmanuel Macron, France’s president. In Asia we looked at the science behind the threat from disinformation. Our interview with Mr Macron took place in the opulent salon doré, which looks out from the first floor onto the expansive gardens of the Elysée Palace. It was a beautiful spring day and I was joined by our Paris bureau chief, Sophie Pedder. Through a half-open French window onto the balcony, you could hear birdsong. The jollity made Mr Macron’s apocalyptic warning about Europe’s future all the more shocking. His worry is not just for the European Union, or even the defence of European territory. It is about the durability of a set of rules and values, underpinned by economic wealth and physical security, which bind all Europeans. European civilisation, he told us, is in mortal danger. We had a photographer there and before we started the interview, he had some moments to snap France’s president against a dark screen set up at the top of the Elysée’s grand marble staircase. Seven years ago, when Emmanuel Macron was first elected president, his campaign was brimming over with optimism. This shot is sombre and bleak. Here is a man with a furrowed brow who has seen the future. But this shot, taken as the interview was under way, is much better. Mr Macron spoke to us about the triple shock of interconnected threats facing Europe. The first is geopolitical: its struggle to stand up to Russia bent on war, even as America’s future commitment to Europe has gone wobbly. Second is an alarming industrial gap that has opened up as Europe has fallen behind America and China, especially in renewable energy and artificial intelligence. Mr Macron’s third theme is the frailty of Europe’s politics, under assault from a resurgent nationalism, turbo-charged by disinformation and echo-chamber news. The trouble with this picture was the president’s wrist. Like a Wimbledon winner flashing his Rolex, Mr Macron has a watch and it jumps out at you. Not only was this the watch-lite version of Mr Macron, but France’s president is pitched towards our masthead at an alarming angle, one eye deep in shadow. We tried to give the cover a historic weight, by putting it in black and white. But colour had an urgency that captured Mr Macron’s intensity. Behind him the gilt moulding of the salon doré is a sulphurous, egg-yolk yellow. Mr Macron’s ideas have real power, and he has proved prescient in the past. He is clearer about the perils Europe is facing than the leader of any other large country. But he is bedevilled by unpopularity at home and poor relations with Germany. The tragedy for Europe is that the words of France’s Cassandra may well fall on deaf ears. Our second cover is about the falsehoods that are intended to deceive. Disinformation is being spread around the world by increasingly sophisticated campaigns. Artificial intelligence and intricate networks of social-media accounts are ­being used to make and share eerily convincing photos, video and audio, confusing fact with fiction. In a year when half the world is holding elections, this is fuelling fears that technology will make disinformation impossible to fight, fatally undermining democracy. How worried should you be? Here we have a wolf in a digital sheep’s clothing. Disinformation has existed for as long as there have been two sides to an argument, but the internet has made the problem much worse. Social media have made false information very cheap to spread; artificial intelligence makes it very cheap to produce. This is a clever idea. Our designers have taken the truth and wrapped it in barbed-wired writing to spell out the word “lies”. Disinformation obscures the truth, by cloaking it in scurrilous untruth of the sort that people love to believe. Take, for example, the story that Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, went on a $1.1m shopping spree on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. This was a Russian campaign that began as a video on YouTube, before passing through African fake-news websites and being boosted by other sites and social-media accounts. The trouble is that “lies” here is too hard to read. If this was how disinformation worked, the truth would be easy to spot and the lies barely intelligible. The goal of many operations is not necessarily to make you support one political party over another. Sometimes the aim is simply to pollute the public sphere, or sow distrust in media, governments, and the very idea that truth is knowable. Hence the Chinese fables about weather weapons in Hawaii, or Russia’s bid to conceal its role in shooting down a Malaysian airliner by promoting several competing narratives. The common feature is that disinformation grabs you. One of our designers is a keen fisherman and he thought of comparing it to bait on a hook. Here is one hook, with one bright-red, wormy lie. Our final cover ended up depicting lots of worms. The reality is that the truth is often outnumbered. Cover image • View large image (“Europe in mortal danger”) • View large image (“The new science of disinformation”) Backing stories → Emmanuel Macron’s urgent message for Europe (Leader) → Emmanuel Macron on how to rescue Europe (Europe) → How disinformation works—and how to counter it (Leader) → Disinformation is on the rise. How does it work? (Science and technology)