The Guardian

The Guardian (known as The Observer for its Sunday edition)[notes 1] 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] Unsurprisingly (thanks to a certain hypothesis), the comments on their Internet 24/7 blogorama Comment is Free can be somewhat problematic, and in the UK, an exhibition of the worst of the paper's vomit-inducing transphobic bent.[3][4] But at least it's sort of free, so we can't complain too much.

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“”The Guardian is such a biased, multi-culti, middle-class, left-wing rag, it could be Swedish.
—Pat Condell, complimenting Sweden[1]

Columnists

Its columnists include David Mitchell, a rare breed of politically-aware comedians,[5] and it also hosts the anti-science and anti-mathematic screeds of Simon Jenkins[6] and a variety of transphobic writings on gender from the likes of Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel.

Former columnists include confessed misanthrope Charlie Brooker,[7], who since moved on to television; excellent science writer and sceptic Ben Goldacre[8] (who had his legal fees paid by the paper during his lawsuit with woo-peddler Mattias Rath); and Ariane Sherine,[9] who was responsible for setting up the atheist bus campaign, although more recently she has concentrated on comedy.

Its science section also sometimes features RationalWiki contributor The Lay Scientist (under his IRL name Martin Robbins).[10] 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.

More recently, Glenn Greenwald[11] has done massive work covering privacy issues post-PATRIOT. In 2013, he formally resigned and is working on new projects.

The Grauniad
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
“”Comment is free, but facts are scared
—P. C. Scott[citation NOT needed]
“”The Dawkins inspired "atheist ranters" come out in force on Guardian pages. They hate organised religion with a zeal, they deride the faithful as mentally retarded, they gibber on about spaghetti monsters and sky pixies, as if such talk actually added anything meaningful to the debate. They debase Dawkins' own arguments through grotesque simplifications, and they adore the man almost reverentially. It is easy to picture these sycophantic drones smugly typing their intolerant bile, glowing with inner pride at their own rebellious contrariness.
—Another Angry Voice, a left-leaning internet blogger[12]

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.[13]

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

Transphobia

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.[14] This has not succeeded, and many transgender staff have been subsequently forced out in the face of institutional transphobia,[3][4] making The Guardian one of the worst publications on transgender issues currently operating in the UK.

Regular columnist Julie Bindel is particularly hostile to the whole concept of trans people, as part of a radical feminist critique of gender; she has 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".[15] She has been no-platformed for her transphobia several times.[16] As a side note she also denies the existence of bisexuality.[17]

After the resignation of two transgender employees from the publication in August 2019 in protest of the newspaper's transphobic reporting,[3] the word 'cis-gendered' was removed from the Guardian's style guide in December 2019 by its staff,[18] an obvious but also extremely silly dogwhistle, that does nothing but prove how prevalent transphobia still is in the Guardian UK a year on.

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, not including trans-women - 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 alleged paedophile Roman Polanski.[19] This resulted in a letter signed by over 200 British feminists condemning the article's main writer, Suzanne Moore, and rejecting the transphobic narrative trans rights infringe on women's rights,[20] as well as a subsequent open letter condemning the publications 'pattern of abusive articles about trans people' signed by 2,250+ people.[21] Signatories included Guardian staff, and UK politicians like Green Party co-leader Sian Berry.[20] The Guardian has taken no action against Suzanne Moore, proving accusations of institutional transphobia, prompting yet another resignation from a transgender employee.[4]

Other criticisms

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;[22] however, a September 2011 column by Andy Newman finally denounced Atzmon and criticised the British left for ignoring anti-Semitism.[23] 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.[24] 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.[25] 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.[26]

WikiLeaks

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 [27]. The story was quickly edited and more-or-less retracted within a few days.[28]

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.[29]

Crossword

The Guardian crossword, a standard British cryptic-style puzzle in which the definition is only part of each clue, is a long-time favourite of cruciverbalists. It is devised by a rotating team of some 30 compilers, each with his/her characteristic style and special interests. Access to the online version is free, and various cheat levels are available up to an instant solution of the entire puzzle at the click of a mouse.

Style guide

The Guardian's style guide, edited by David Marsh and Amelia Hodsdon,[30] 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).[31][32] 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.[33] 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
gollark: I mean, if you ignore all the horrible problems, yes.
gollark: It isn't. It has a fancy distributed network of sensor/hologram projector nodes which make fake fireballs, and also access to the orbital laser systems.
gollark: It's very good, and was briefly Supreme Dictator of Earth, actually.
gollark: No, just the bible at that point.
gollark: Oh, I wrote that with GPT-4 in 2033 and sent it back in time, actually.

See also

Notes
  1. Effectively - The Observer began as a separate Sunday newspaper in 1791 and predates the then Manchester Guardian by 30 years. Guardian Media Group acquired The Observer in 1993 as its Sunday organ.

References
  1. http://youtu.be/D4YMbsEm3ms?t=2m9s
  2. Statistics Summary for guardian.co.uk
  3. The Guardian Newspaper Has Lost Two Trans Employees Over Its Reporting On Trans Issues, BuzzFeed News, August 15, 2019
  4. Yet another trans person dramatically quits The Guardian amid bitter transphobia row, PinkNews, March 3rd, 2020
  5. The Guardian - David Mitchell
  6. The Guardian - Simon Jenkins
  7. The Guardian - Charlie Brooker
  8. The Guardian - Ben Goldacre
  9. The Guardian - Ariane Sherine
  10. The Guardian - The Lay Scientist
  11. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/glenn-greenwald
  12. Richard Dawkins and the slave trade, Another Angry Voice.
  13. "commonly known as Dom" airs his views in the "law" section of this article and gets totally schooled a couple of days later.
  14. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/02/guardian-editorial-response-transgender-rights-uk
  15. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/31/gender.weekend7 Gender benders, beware], Julie Bindel, The Guardian, 31 Jan 2004
  16. If you don't like no-platforming, maybe it's you who's the 'special snowflake', Sean Faye The Independent, 19 Feb 2016
  17. Where’s the Politics in Sex?, Julie Bindel, Huffington Post, 06/12/2012
  18. Apologies for the Twitter GIFs.
  19. "Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced", Suzanne Moore, The Guardian, March 2nd, 2020.
  20. Hundreds of feminists write to The Guardian rejecting argument that trans rights threaten women, PinkNews, March 5th, 2020.
  21. Thousands more sign letter to The Guardian protesting ‘pattern of abusive articles about trans people’, PinkNews, March 6th, 2020.
  22. http://cifwatch.com/2011/10/02/jew-hatred-as-liberal-commentary-guardian-provides-platform-to-vicious-antisemitie-gilad-atzmon/
  23. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/25/gilad-atzmon-antisemitism-the-left
  24. http://hurryupharry.org/2011/10/30/friends-of-raed-salah-is-the-guardian-a-newspaper/
  25. http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/91164/antisemitic-guardian-gaza-cartoon-shows-jews-puppeteers
  26. http://www.thehopkinsonreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/steepling-positive-body-language.jpg
  27. Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy
  28. The Guardian fabricated, altered and stealthily retracted their Wikileaks-Manafort story to muted criticism from the ‘fake news’ obsessives
  29. Marshall Cohen, Kay Guerrero, and Arturo Torres, "Security reports reveal how Assange turned an embassy into a command post for election meddling." CNN, July 15, 2019. Accessed July 15, 2019.
  30. Guardian and Observer style guide, The Guardian
  31. https://www.thoughtco.com/top-free-online-style-guides-in-english-1688760 Top 8 Free Online Style Guides in English , Thought.com
  32. Multimedia Journalism: A Practical Guide, Andy Bull, Routledge, 2015
  33. UPDATE: Guardian Style Guide: Tel Aviv No Longer Israel’s Capital, Honest Reporting
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