Yes it is. Keep in mind it’s only my own, personal assessment, and I have no formal training in political science nor media studies. That said, the Economist is ranked where it is…
On the social scale: Because, although it is only occasional, you are still more likely to find arguments against the drug war than you are in most mainstream media outside of borderline far-leftist outlets like the Guardian or Die Tageszeitung, which, ironically, condemn the Economist as a tool of international banking, which they mistakenly believe is the agent and executor of the free market.
On the economic scale: As LeeO describes in this thread (and I can vouch for him given my admittedly limited reading of the Economist and the cultural/sociopolitical “tone” it and it’s staff and affiliaties give off), the Economist chiefly reflects a form of centrist Keynesian (or more properly, Modern Keynesian-Neoclassical synthesis) internationalism more bound to a utilitarian “efficiency technician” role than the quasireligious Pietism of social democracy reflected in most establishment non-Eastern European media. Fox, and the rest of the Murdoch empire in general, is more bound to a rightist form of cultural conservatism combined with promotion of American exceptionalism as conducive to Western interests, and effectively acts as the mouthpiece of the US Republican Party, which holds similar principles. Keynesian internationalism is far less popular in the US than it is in Europe, given America still retains a strong nationalistic temperament and has not yet been subjugated to an international domineering entity like the UN, EU or the hypothetical North American Union, though Progressive Rooseveltian thought is undoubtedly it’s ideological progenitor. I suspect the Economist also reflects a Fox like role towards the London School of Economics.