The Guardian

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The Guardian is a British centre-left newspaper (beloved of organically-grown, muesli-wearing, sandal-hugging, tree-eating, disabled, lesbian, atheistic, feminist social workers and teachers) with one of the most popular websites in the United Kingdom.^[2] The Observer is its affiliated Sunday newspaper.^{[note 1]}

Columnists[edit]

Its columnists include David Mitchell, a rare breed of politically-aware comedians,^[3] and it also hosts the anti-science and anti-mathematic screeds of Simon Jenkins.^[4]

Former columnists include confessed misanthrope Charlie Brooker,^[5] who since moved on to television; excellent science writer and skeptic Ben Goldacre^[6] (who had his legal fees paid by the paper during his lawsuit with woo-peddler Mattias Rath); and Ariane Sherine,^[7] who was responsible for setting up the atheist Bus Campaign and later concentrated on comedy.

Its science section also sometimes features RationalWiki contributor The Lay Scientist (under his IRL name Martin Robbins).^[8] During the 2010 general election, Robbins wrote analytical commentaries to the major parties' responses to science-related questions asked by Brian Cox, Simon Singh, and David Nutt.

Glenn Greenwald^[9] did massive work covering privacy issues in the post-PATRIOT world, but resigned in 2013 to pursue other projects.

The Grauniad[edit]

What's wrong with this picture?

The papper was once notorios for it's many toyps and other ovbious mstakes, so that Private Eye always refereed to it as "The Grauniad" after it was sad to hve msprinted it's own name — an epethet which bcame comon usige. www.grauniad.co.uk redirects to the propper name, and Wikiipeida has a similar reedirect.

Example: "The audience was encouraged to wander over the stage and activate hidden censors"

Comment is free[edit]

Comment is Free (CiF) is the comment and opinion... "section" on The Guardian's website that publishes content submitted by, well, potentially anyone. Authors are free to suggest themselves, and, if approved, get to write a column. While there are some editorial standards, it's not considered a part of the Guardian proper and it's not supposed to reflect the paper's stance — it's intended to be something of an open forum in the spirit of attracting page views the open exchange of ideas, page views intellectual debate, and page views the accumulation of hundreds of posts with varying level of stupidity in the comment section of each column.

Due to the controversial nature of some contributions, there's the inevitable suspicion that The Guardian is trolling its own audience for page views, and even then there are "WTF were they thinking when they approved this?" moments, such as when CiF invited contributions from members of the Occupy St Paul's movement in 2011 and Freeman on the land garbage got a free airing in a national newspaper.^[11]

The comment section on the CiF articles is naturally even worse, being filled to the brim with alt-right talking points, anti-semitism, conspiracy theories, and just plain weirdness. The editorial staff tries to moderate and patrol, but... There is only so much you can do. We know the feeling.

Transphobia[edit]

Contributor Julie Bindel in a 2004 column used hostile and insulting language towards trans people such as calling a trans woman "a man in a dress" and referring to trans men who "have their breasts sliced off and a penis made out of their beer bellies".^[12] Bindel has since apologized for the language she used. As of 2016, she been no-platformed for her transphobia several times.^[13] As a side note, she also denies the existence of bisexuality.^[14]

In recent years, particularly during the Gender Recognition Act Consultation in 2018, The Guardian's TERFs have been writing hit pieces against the trans community, so much so that their US team had to tell their British colleagues to shut up and stop pretending all trans women were rapists.^[15] This has not succeeded, and many transgender staff have been subsequently forced out in the face of institutional transphobia.

After the resignation of two transgender employees from the publication in August 2019 in protest of the newspaper's transphobic reporting, the word 'cis-gendered' was removed from The Guardian's style guide in December 2019 by its staff.^[16]

The Guardian came under public fire once more in March 2020, after the publication of an article that called transgender women the "real enemy to women" — naturally, forgetting about or just ignoring the existence of trans men — and threatening violence against transgender people by saying people "wouldn't go down quietly" if British trans people gained the right of self-identification. They also suggested that a group of female feminists excluding transphobe Selina Todd from an event was equivalent to people supporting paedophile Roman Polanski.^[17] This resulted in a letter signed by over 200 British feminists condemning the article's writer, Suzanne Moore, and rejecting the transphobic narrative trans rights infringe on women's rights,^[18] as well as a subsequent open letter condemning the publication's 'pattern of abusive articles about trans people' signed by 2,250+ people.^[19] Signatories included Guardian staff, and UK politicians like Green Party co-leader Sian Berry.^[18] The Guardian took no action against Suzanne Moore, proving accusations of institutional transphobia, prompting yet another resignation from a transgender employee. Moore left in 2020, followed by Hadley Freeman in 2022, both objecting to the rejection of their pitches for articles relating to transgender issues.

Other criticisms[edit]

In the past few years, the paper was accused of supporting anti-Semitic commentators. In the past, it has written approvingly of Gilad Atzmon, portraying him as a mere pro-Palestine activist and glossing over his dodgy statements about "the Holocaust religion" and Jewish conspiracies;^[20] however, a September 2011 column by Andy Newman finally denounced Atzmon and criticised the British left for ignoring anti-Semitism.^[21] The paper has also written approvingly about Raed Salah, depicting him as an innocent victim of prejudice rather than a purveyor of medieval anti-Jewish sentiment.^[22] In 2012, the paper was criticized for running a cartoon which depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as a "puppet master" for members of the British Government, including Tony Blair — playing on the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are cunning manipulators and that Blair isn't capable of thinking on his own.^[23] Guardian editors seemed to have embraced false dichotomy in this aspect — that you have to have to be a raving nut of an anti-Zionist to critique Israel's human rights record.

Senior members of the British Parliament have claimed that The Guardian may be guilty of treason in leaking data given to them by Edward Snowden regarding the NSA's spying operations. British former Prime Minister, David Cameron, has ridiculously accused The Guardian of "aiding the enemies" of the United Kingdom.^[24]

In 2013, The Guardian published an article by the fringe Post-Keynesian economist Mark Weisbrot predicting that the problems of Venezuelan economy would be easily fixed and claiming that "Hyperinflation is also a very remote possibility".^[25] Between 2013 and 2020, the country's GDP dropped 75%^[26] with a ten million (you read it right) inflation rate in 2019.^[27]

WikiLeaks[edit]

The Guardian published the Iraq War Logs and were big fans of WikiLeaks in the early 2010s. Their editorial stance quickly shifted in 2016 when WikiLeaks published the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's chief of staff John Podesta.

In a November 2018 Guardian article, Luke Harding and Dan Collyns cited anonymous sources which stated that Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015, and 2016.^[28] The story was quickly edited and more-or-less retracted within a few days.^[29]

However, a July 2019 investigation cast new light on this possibility, since Assange was allegedly able to delete names from the embassy's visitor log.^[30]

Style guide[edit]

The Guardian's style guide, edited by David Marsh and Amelia Hodsdon,^[31] sets out the rules for its journalists and writers to use in their prose. It is regarded as one of the most authoritative style guides for journalism in British English (along with those of The Economist and the Daily Telegraph).^[32][33] This requires making a variety of determinations not only about punctuation, capitalisation, variant spellings, common errors and clichés to watch out for, and English usage, but also about how to describe places and people, for instance whether to refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.^[34] Hence it makes various judgement calls on what to call indigenous peoples and ethnic groups, what to call people with AIDS ("people with Aids" not "victims of Aids"), usage of phrases such as "alt-right" (should be in quotes and "evidence-based"), "gay" (an adjective not a noun), whether to capitalise "Google" (even when a verb), "Gypsies ("are recognised as an ethnic group under the Race Relations Act, as are Irish Travellers, hence capped up"), "tabloid" (to be used of traditional redtops like The Sun but "not shrunken broadsheets"), "schizophrenia" (only for those with the specific mental condition), and accurate health reporting (anti-viral drug Tamiflu is not to be described as a flu vaccine).

Columnists[edit]

• Charlie Brooker
• Ben Goldacre
• Glenn Greenwald
• Simon Jenkins
• Owen Jones
• George Monbiot

See also[edit]

• The Daily Mail, its polar opposite
• Daily Telegraph, its ideological rival
• The Nation, its American counterpart

External links[edit]

• Official website
• Transphobia in the UK, a highly informative video essay by Shaun that explicitly discusses transphobic articles by the Guardian UK

Notes[edit]

References[edit]