title: Why the Guardian Sucks
date: 2022-12-02
tags: phlog political-thought web
identifier: 20221202T163240
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Someone from the federal socials noticed that I dissed the
Guardian and asked me what I thought was wrong with it. That’s
not a question I can answer short form.
I should start by giving a little context. I grew up in the UK,
in an upper middle class home with professional class parents,
themselves from working class backgrounds. My mother was a teach‐
er who quit to raise us. My father was an optometrist, his family
coming to the UK as part of one of the Jewish diasporas, from
Lithuania some time before the Russian Revolution.
Both of my parents were great believers in the rule of law, and
the golden rule. Notionally socialist, they enjoyed a high
(boomer) standard of living, were culturally quite snobbish, and
participated in group activities designed for people with spare
time and resources.
In short, they were typical Guardian readers.
I live in Toronto now ‐ I’ve been Canadian for over a decade and
lived in Canada since 2004. Been in North America since 2000. I
have observed that there aren’t really any national newspapers on
this continent. There are publications that will be laying on the
floor in front of your hotel room door in the morning, but they
aren’t really newspapers. There’s nothing that a newsreader on a
national TV broadcast would reach for a pile of at the end of the
main news and say "let’s look at tomorrow’s newspaper headlines"
in order to get a taste of what was on their editors’ minds.
In that context, the Guardian was and is a helluva lot better
than say the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Mirror, the
Times, etc. And I can definitely see why someone coming from a
North American news ecosystem would find the Guardian to be a su‐
perior source of news.
But it is a salve. It placates the middle class, or those that
feel the twinge of activation in the face of injustice. It in‐
dulges in "both sides" reporting, and renders equivalences across
its pages by representing trivial matters in a similar way to im‐
portant and pressing issues.
It makes a magazine of the news. It turns the news into a nicely
packaged component of a well balanced daily diet, so that the
patterns of your life can wash away the intuition you briefly
felt to panic. It indulges in punny headlines, which are often
inaccurate and misleading. It platforms TERFs without comment.
And, as it has shrunk its editorial staff, and aside from colum‐
nists, stopped hiring actual reporters, it does things like re‐
porting press releases unchecked, and (here’s the point I was
making when I was asked about this) publishes controversial
tweets with light commentary presented as news.
It isn’t the only news organization that does that. Of late, and
after Trump, it became difficult to ignore twitter. But the cur‐
rent diaspora has evinced the problems with twitter; listening to
and reading the discourse between journalists in podcasts and
around quoted tweets in columns written by opinionators, its
clear that they had come to see it as something very much other
than what it is and always was.
Twitter was always the domain of shitposting edgelords. The
Guardian, along with others, elevated it to a level of import it
never should have had. It took the place of journalism in many
places and now they and others are struggling to get past it.
Most people don’t use it. It is apparently the 15th largest so‐
cial network, with around 390 million active ("monetizable" lol)
users. Even in the US, where it has the most users, less than
half of the largest represented demographic (18 ‐ 29) is there.
Most people don’t post there, they just doom scroll. No‐one needs
an online news magazine that picks out tweets and comments on
them as if that were the same kind of thing as reporting on
Ukrainian war deaths, which often shares roughly the same column
inch count.
They establish equivalences which get internalized by their audi‐
ence ‐ sports are another example. Take a look at the coverage of
the world cup. There are some thoughtful columns making blinding‐
ly obvious ethical statements about FIFA and Qatar, and then
there are all the "apolitical" sports articles. They have the
same look and feel as everything else on the Guardian homepage.
We see artful photos of man fighting raging fires, subtitled with
notes about the climate emergency, alongside headlines promising
to grudgingly thank Trump for popularizing the word "gaslight‐
ing". Then at the end of the week, the photos of raging fires
make it into the notable photos of the week, once again bringing
the disasters they represent into the balanced Saturday morning
dietary selection. By Monday the edge is well and truly off them,
and they’re filed alongside Greta Thunberg making a funny, proba‐
bly on twitter.
I’m sure there are more things I dislike about it. But I’m get‐
ting incoherent now, so let’s stop.
