Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

100/1 banky
150/1 krtek

500/1 Gaz Coombes

Thanks for the clarifications Matt.

Was just reading a piece, proposing a Momentum based media initiative.

https://newsocialist.org.uk/proposal-momentum-media-fund/

It talks about missed opportunities for Labour to have it's own media in the past, and touches on the question of trust.

xp
"In Supergrass we kept our political view for the pub table"

“fkknutter” otm

apart from the bit about scrapping living underground, ffs!

I guess I am surprised if the younger readership is holding up because plenty of ppl I know who were reading it at least online 5-10 years ago aren't any more, and my 20yo brother and his friends will follow links but aren't going to check the front page for news and have never really established any sort of newspaper habit (they don't really watch films either which seems more wild to me)

That's true but idea of checking a homepage for news is in decline across the industry - unless they have the app downloaded (which I think is a minority of slightly older users) audiences just don't consume online media like that any more. Traffic to the homepage is usually much lower than it is to other pages.

Audiences tend to arrive through other ways, mainly social media - it's one of the reason why the big tech providers, Facebook in particular, are both so powerful and resented. (The fact that Facebook and Google are also eating their advertising lunch several times over is adding injury to insult here).

Also readers will be engaging differently with the news when they're 30 to when they're 18-20, that's almost inevitable.

In general I agree that the idea of loyalty to any one news outlet is over but the Guardian itself has been one of the beneficiaries of more omnivorous reading habits. Whether that's commercially sustainable is a different question.

That Marina Hyde post by Calzino deserves more attention.

That's 2013. Hyde promoting NF in a 'he's just a laugh' way. She also explicitly (hyperbolically) says that she'd do anything to avoid having a drink with Ed Miliband.

It's disgusting. It's complicit - in the way that HIGNFY? is. It's shameful. And she has got away with it.

you can't cancel the Baroness, she's got friends in high places. it beggars belief that someone who prefers Farage to Ed Milli gets so many plaudits from liberals and left leaning social democrats (alright "melts" then!) for her oh so droll and hilarious takedowns of Tories. She is about as Tory as they fucking come really.

she was happy left-posturing when Blair and Brown were in power and attacking them from the left, but when Labour got a centre-left leader, like the Greens she shit the bed at the idea.

about half of these commemorate a fascist paramilitary organisation but cute graphics huh https://t.co/4jtuuVvNSr

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) July 20, 2020

Jesus Christ.

these are basically the same lads that worked at Treblinka, wtf are they thinking about?

Great bunch of Nazis.

Alexa, play Nokturnal Mortum and Drudkh!

I'm genuinely not sure whether they think this is fine or if they just don't have anyone on staff with even the slightest clue as to why it wouldn't be.

Genocide-imon cards - gotta catch 'em all!

I'd be absolutely amazed if Kadish Morris, who seems to be a good sort, would publish this knowing the context but...is there no process for internal review?

How did a project run by a guy whose main web presence seems to be a Facebook page with 176 followers get this to them in the first place?

tbf who would suspect that anti-Soviet propaganda from Eastern European might contain some fascist iconography?

scuse my spellchecker

Kaddish huh

Is life too fuckin weird sometimes or what

This doesn't look in any way dodgy at all... 😬 pic.twitter.com/Tk4f03UaxE

— ⚙️🌾Planned Economy Please 🇵🇸 (@jamtapot) July 20, 2020

They should get Jonathan Jones (or, as they call it, "The Model") to fact-check this kind of submission in future.

On a side note, the Victims Of Communism Foundation, in addition to counting millions of people who were never born but might have been had it not been for Stalin, is adding all COVID-19 deaths globally to its running total.

They're historic items - it wouldn't be odd to see them in a museum.

I don't really see why the Guardian shouldn't reproduce them, unless they're spinning it in a misleading way (which perhaps they are).

I can imagine a similar series of, say, IRA or UVF posters. Definitely significant historical documents, worth seeing. But shouldn't be shown by the Guardian without a lot of context? Maybe.

Funnily enough here's a directly comparable example!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2015/mar/04/belfast-murals-in-pictures

On a side note, the Victims Of Communism Foundation, in addition to counting millions of people who were never born but might have been had it not been for Stalin, is adding all COVID-19 deaths globally to its running total.

Japanese soldiers who invaded China, for sure. Not sure about Germans.

xp, Yes, the context is completely absent. It's presented simply as 'Ukrainian resistance'. The project is run by a guy who vocally supports the legacy of the OUN and takes the line that the Nazis weren't as bad as the Communists wrt Ukraine.

The IRA and UVF, iirc, have not actively participated in a genocide.

The 'this doesn't look in any way dodgy' image above is surely meant to represent Lenin himself right

/minor pedantry

Taking aside where it comes from for a moment the Ukraine stuff really needed a line or two of context below it. It's the first difference you notice between that and the Belfast link.

Do you think the Belfast link has enough 'context'?

I find it an interesting comparison; not really sure what the right conclusion is.

The importance of context in Ukraine shouldn't come as news to a paper that famously published a puff piece about women fighting on the frontline and had to go back to update it with a caption explaining why one of them was standing in front of a van with '1488' stenciled on the side.

PF - I think for a link of photographs that is basically, mostly, about the aesthetics of murals, and let's assume a British newspaper audience would be more familiar with the ins and outs of the conflict then I think yes, that would be enough.

Not the case for the Ukraine.

Not the case for a British newspaper audience with regard to NI tbf

Ok, what about The Guardian audience?

yeah i know i was just being trenchant. good slice of the Graun audience likely just as ignorant. none of it the same as contextless sharing pro-Nazi stuff, of course.

Guardian doesn’t even bother covering the 12th and its increase in genocidal rhetoric every year, idk why the murals piece would be better than that.

A former editor writes.

pic.twitter.com/rarZFva66c

— Conrad Landin (@conradlandin) July 20, 2020

when Rusbridger laid down his 10 ideas for Open Journalism he never mentioned no 11: it's actually an observer piece

kinder/ogmor: I can't share our data, but the Reuters DNR says broadly similar things. Full site here: http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2020/overview-key-findings-2020/

Key bits:
Trust in sources, UK:
https://i.imgur.com/nR22Ftf.png

Lol Print is fucked:
https://i.imgur.com/9z5QtTx.png

Objective vs "partisan" (this is global figure, UK not broken out here):
https://i.imgur.com/cn9h8CQ.png

Global print figure also eesh:
https://i.imgur.com/7PRFjCh.png

lol the trust in tv news sources table does not reflect the order of trust i'd give them

Yeah on that, it's amazing how much trust in the BBC in particular has declined among what the report calls the "more-partisan" - people who class themselves as very-left or very-right

https://i.imgur.com/ylFotUO.png

attitudes must lag a fair bit behind reality, Sky is pretty widely considered to have a good news output nowadays and from what i see of it it's certainly no more partisan or plain dumb than the big terrestrial stations.

and who the hell are all these people trusting local newspapers, which have always been consistently right wing, sensationalist and plain sloppy?

I only trust commenters on local newspaper websites

Lol qft