Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

He's right about Toynbee though.

all of those people* are exactly what's wrong with the guardian.

I mean, I'm not sure this is true. We tend to focus on the pointless fluff here but there are worse crimes committed in the main newspaper on a daily basis.

dowling = bad column in the weekend bit; their worst tv writer (woolaston is actually better than he reads i think)

petridis would be better if editor would tell him 'no, cut the prickish joke here and actually engage' on bits where he is doing prickish jokes instead of engaging

xposts

what are the worse crimes committed in the main section today, for the sake of argt.? (n.b. haven't had a chance to do more than glance at it yet)

Polly Toynbee. Jackie Ashley. Seamus Milne. Madeline Bunting. Peter Preston. All worse than the above, mostly because they're writing about issues of substance.

(Sorry, not today's edition, but you get what I mean...)

ha i was gonna say ...

Marina Hyde isnt wonderful, shes just another overly smug idiot trotting out yet more celeb fluff but under the guise of hating celeb fluff. not bad looking though. id smash. Tim Dowling used to make me laugh a bit, but now he just seems to be on autopilot. both those weekend columns are pointless and deserve to be hidden away. preferably in another paper. wollaston's tv columns are never insightful. theyre just dull and muddy. like most of their g2 tv reviewers actually.

liddle was kinda otm except for the writers he named.

stilll, i dunno what other papers to read.

The Guardian is a lot like ILX, actually, You think it's tedious, smug, hypocritical, poorly written and badly thought out, full of pompous windbags flapping their predictable opinions - until you go around and check out the alternatives, and you realise that really, it's not half as bad as you think it is by comparison.

true

all of those people* are exactly what's wrong with the guardian.

I mean, I'm not sure this is true. We tend to focus on the pointless fluff here but there are worse crimes committed in the main newspaper on a daily basis.

― Matt DC, Friday, March 5, 2010 4:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Polly Toynbee. Jackie Ashley. Seamus Milne. Madeline Bunting. Peter Preston. All worse than the above, mostly because they're writing about issues of substance.

― Matt DC, Friday, March 5, 2010 5:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

alright ok, i can get behind this. im more likely to read the pointless fluff. i guess reading it online nothing is "tucked away" so marina hyde feels like a more visible presence than madeline bunting, who i never read. toynbee is "just there". i don't think jackie ashley is bad exactly; like martin kettle it's kind of interesting to get an idea of what the labour big shots are talking/arguing about behind the scenes.

seamus milne is a menace and an idiot imho

We're now taking Liddle's opinions seriously? Might as well start quoting Nick Griffin next.

Categorising Liddle as a racist is reductive and unhelpful and true.

The Guardian is a lot like ILX, actually, You think it's tedious, smug, hypocritical, poorly written and badly thought out, full of pompous windbags flapping their predictable opinions - until you go around and check out the alternatives, and you realise that really, it's not half as bad as you think it is by comparison.

Very much otm. I know it's not really a comparison, but the quickest way to send my blood pressure through the roof of a morning is to have a read through the comments on the Guardian blogs. By comparison to the incessant clusterfuck idiocy there, the Graun's actual writers are like dear and cherished friends to me.

Wow when did Rod Liddle turn into Jeremy Clarkson? That oped piece is atrocious. I can't believe something so thick-headed even got published in a "proper" magazine.

And, even though I'm repeating myself, is there anything more fucking stupid and culturally reductive than this white middle class journalist man as whiny victim of "PC", the "left" etc, which seems to have become a media trope @ sometime during the last decade?

(obv unrelated to the guardian, but, you know)

Hatred of "PC" only means someone female, or with views to the left of this type of correspondent, has called such a person out on his poor manners.

Wow when did Rod Liddle turn into Jeremy Clarkson?

ohhhh

there is much worse out there from liddle

it's not an article but a blogpost, though

A blog post? Maybe somebody guessed his password and posted it without him knowing.

darraghmac strikes again!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/11/generation-x-sarcasm-seriously

But by the time I was born, in the 1970s, some detached, too-cool Left Bank intellectual had taken a break from his doctorate in semiotics to invent postmodernism, and we were doomed to a world of irony.

good point darra!

tbh my reaction to that is 'haha u old'

It's about time someone wrote an article about Gen X and irony.

been waiting twenty years for it

it was on the tip of everyone's tongue; darraghmac just gave it a name

I used to like Peter Preston's columns for some reason, but I seem to have forgotten what it was.

i get blamed for everything around here.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/09/finnegans-wake-nonsense

you just get worse and worse don't you.

Oh ffs

This cunt is now officially offensive to the point of it not being funny to jibe our darragh about it

yeah but but but
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/12/malcolm-tucker-election-briefing

a++ intervention guardianistas

didn't even read that irony article...basically clear it was some utter fucking moron. guardian actually hurts me as a human being once it goes beyond party politics and news.

I can't believe some people actually even vaguely considered the merits of Liddle's piece - what a hateful, hateful piece of crap that man is.

And also, James Joyce quite obviously couldn't read Finnegan's Wake because he was ALMOST BLIND during the writing of it. So shut up, dickfaces.

Was today's Weekend magazine photo feature on Cameron supporters supposed to be a hit list? Or just a sign that I should stop buying The Guardian?

Was today's Weekend magazine photo feature on Cameron supporters supposed to be a hit list? Or just a sign that I should stop buying The Guardian?

i only saw a couple of those pictures on the website - there's some horrendous audio-slideshow in which they talk about the virtues of 'at the coalface' governance and some other shit - but i kind of feel like as an article it has some anthropological value. they did one about the new breed of young, fashionable, glassy-eyed tories a few years ago (just after cameron became leader iirc) which was terrifying. these things should be kept for posterity so their protagonists can be tracked down in five years and made to answer a tribunal.

See, I'd like to believe it had anthropological value but ... it just felt like Cameronite porn ... and the Guardian clearly saying it's fine to vote Conservative because a gay man and a novelist are going to.

Is it me, or is the Graun noticeabley and nakedly more partisan than it used to be, even by Graun standards? Am solid anti-Tory but this is ridiculous: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/mar/22/conservatives-cashgordon)

In the words of @wdjstraw: "Tory #cashgordon campaign brought to you by the team that tried to scupper US healthcare reform. #ToryFail"

Am I getting old or something?

I don't understand this board's hatred for Seumas Milne. A "menace"?? If only there were more journalists willing to uphold the argument for strong trade unionism like in this routinely excellent piece from last week...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/unions-attack-democracy-unite-ba

that piece is unexceptionable, but he's a huge ahmadinejad guy, defends stalin, etc.

^

^^

If only there were more journalists willing to uphold the argument for strong iranian leadership like in this routinely excellent piece from last year...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/18/iran-elections-us-foreign-policy

> Weekend magazine photo feature on Cameron supporters

that cover photo was my local candidate and i already see enough of his face on all the junk mail campaign literature he sends me.

the 'Video games: the addiction' article in the observer was quite poor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/mar/21/tom-bissell-video-game-cocaine-addiction

mainly because the addiction was to cocaine.

Ugh, wtf have they done to their website?

to counter the general tone, zoe williams is killing it recently

Ugh, wtf have they done to their website?

― ears are wounds, Tuesday, March 30, 2010 5:01 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

but yes this is making me seasick. it's like they ran the NYT site through one of these:

http://images.veer.com/IMG/PIMG/MPP/1109739_P.JPG

the 'Video games: the addiction' article in the observer was quite poor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/mar/21/tom-bissell-video-game-cocaine-addiction

mainly because the addiction was to cocaine.

― koogs, Monday, 22 March 2010 18:04 (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

tbf this was a really good article with a stupid headline

This is the typo on the header and lede/standfirst RIGHT NOW:

Warning of more bombers as Moscow death toll rises
Officials say women who blew themselves, killing 39 people, could have been part of squad of up to 20

It's not terrible, and not exactly different, but I'm having a hard time trying to find the news on the homepage. Maybe the idea is to get you to click around the different sections.

From reading that gumpfy blog post about the redesign you'd have thought they'd have made it all ajaxy user-editable with customisable sections like the BBC homepage, or put a great stonking livestreaming video on there.

And for all their fuss about multimedia, god knows why it takes three clicks from the homepage to get to http://www.guardian.co.uk/audio

but yes this is making me seasick. it's like they ran the NYT site through one of these:

otm.

as long as they don't fuck w/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian

Also: shitty new advertising campaign

http://imgur.com/LiAOP.jpg