Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

respectfully BB I still agree with tweet I shared, despite whatever else of value the Graun has done in their Sutcliffe coverage, it makes no difference to me. I grew up in genuine childhood fear that this guy might murder my mum every time she went to work on an evening, so perhaps sometimes agreeing with a sentiment expressed on social doesn't require "confirmation and evaluation" when you know how you feel about something and you know you have a extremely implacable position on it! Anyway fuck this guy and the Graun!

Even the bbc covered the misogyny towards sex workers by WYP, the Graun isn't exactly an outlier here.

That obituary reads like a crib notes version of his Wikipedia page.

his have very sensationalist ross Kemp/danny dyer type titles! That's why I mentioned the Gordon Burn book. He goes so deep into the lives of the victims - you can be reading for hours and forget you are even reading about a murderer.

his books

Calz, one of the things I know - from studying how propaganda and disinformation and conspiracy brainworms - specifically with the aim of trying to trying to mitigate and temper my own extreme emotional reactions to emotive topics?

It’s that stuff that *does* trigger those extremely primal fear reactions, that you have to interrogate the hardest. Something that hits you on that kind of emotive level *does* (and is sometimes intended to!) override your rational and intellectual and contextual responses.

The bigger the emotive kick, the more important it is to train oneself to look for the actual context and source.

Let me have my *what is apparently a controp to amongst you sophisticates of Londonium* and characterising it as a brainworm is a bit insulting and wrong to me. All I'm saying is I have issues with the Graun getting some hack crime-writer in to do a respectable obit of someone just as despicable as anyone you'd find in the paedo wing of monster mansion. There is nothing to interrogate here. I disagree with some of you lot and there are some cultural/class differences at play here, no biggie!

it's too soon as well, there aren't Stepney Green style murder heritage walks in W Yorkshire.

I don’t think you have a brainworm- in fact I don’t even think that this woman has an agenda - however I DO notice she has a book to promote!

Using the death of one serial killer to promote a book about the victims of another serial killer is an... interesting ethical choice!

The thing is - I don’t have a problem with that when people are up front about what they are doing! Kate Manne talking about misogyny and rape culture in a recent election, then going “hey, I literally wrote a book on this exact subject, here’s an excerpt” or Whitney Phillips going “hey - internet conspiracy theories - here’s a link to my research?” - fair enough!

This woman representing the Guardian’s coverage as the exact OPPOSITE of what it was - if you’d read beyond her screengrab, you wouldn’t be talking about ‘London media bias’ in the 4 or 5 other pieces on the subject - to push your emotive buttons to get you to increase her profile off the back of your pain and grievances?

Don’t you find that kind of emotive misrepresentation a little manipulative? Because I would. Maybe you don’t - in which case fair play!

well that sounds fair enough, there are so many arsehole blueticks on with shameless book plugging agendas, the only practicable way to avoid becoming party to their game is to block all blueticks tbf!

I didn't mean to rub you up the wrong way, calzino - they've done obituaries for Osama Bin Laden, for Hindley and Brady - not doing one would seem to me to be more "oh it's just local news" - but I'm not from Yorkshire so I should shut up.

(I'm not a Londoner any more, but since I moved to Edinburgh my grounds for remonstration are reduced)

lol no probs AF. I've got onto a bit of a problematic hill here with lots of windy paths and traps and tripwires around it so fuck knows anymore! But don't be dissing my main man OBL!

seems like one could have run all the other articles without also running an obituary

like if one was going to take seriously the relationship between news, celebrity and gender-based-violence one could consider what kinds of articles to run and what kinds of articles to refrain from running. then it wouldn't be a case of having to mitigate the problematic inclusion of an obituary with other articles that use a different lens. you could simply rethink how this is reported.

the publishing of an obituary is not a natural event that happens by itself and a news source like the guardian could decide to rethink those conventions on the understanding that there might be all kinds of worrying things about celebrity and violence and what makes one 'notable' (the murderer but not the victim) that are perpetuated through these editorial conventions.

I'm glad to be not the only one that thinks the obit is wrong.

ever since about 1988 when I first started seeing the Murder Casebook (gotta collect 'em all!) on the top shelf of the local newsagents, next to the jazzmags. I've had a bad feeling about this creeping celebritization of murderers and how some of them seem to attain obituary in the Graun status because .. why Idk? I went to school with a serial killer who possibly won't get a Graun obit. What is the lesson here? to become a killer with real cultural cache/infamy and get guest appearances in David Peace novels - you just have kill more people!

prurient moatification was always already central to the newstrade: pamphlets in the 1800s abt the red barn murder or last (very made-up) regretful words of the hanged villain cranked out in the seven dials yellow pressed (often simply reusing the illustrations from a previous story bcz #whocare)

Oh I know this old thing, but I just meant seeing Murder Casebook was when the 16 year old me became aware of it but I think I was probably wrongly thinking about it as part of the vulgar Americanisation of things, rather than as a innoble tradition!

I do post in English sometimes as well

I think at the time I was thinking something like Ted Bundy being a celeb murderer on the television, defending himself in court etc was quite shocking and not very cool at all, but all very American of course and wouldn't occur in the UK because our glorious fourth estate are too serious and sensible to elevate murderers to celeb status. That was a naive tbf.

tbf the adventures of Donald Nielson regularly plastered across the front of the Express & Star is one of my first memories of newspapers

My mum had fake leather stool that also doubled as a storage box that had some newspapers she possibly still has somewhere, from different periods of the hunt for the ripper and reportage on his court case. This fule called Sputnik who is one of my partner's ex-boyfriends was part of the baying lynch mob photographed outside Dewsbury cop shop when he was arrested!

My dad got taken to the cop shop as a YR suspect once, my mum said he was more relieved they seemed concerned with eliminating him as a murder suspect rather than asking him to blow into a bag!

my dad looked a lot like Sutcliffe tbf. The Yorkshire Ripper and Omar Sharif are the two people he most often got compared to!

My stepfather went to England in the 80s and was at a party or something and did that thing of “oh you are from this place do you know my friend who is also from this place?” where this place equals an entire country. His friend was a Peter Sutcliffe from Yorkshire so obviously that question did not go down very well!

Lol

Heh. I often wonder whether all the other Peter Sutcliffes, Fred Wests, Harold Shipmans etc change their name once their namesakes are caught.

You’ll never guess who the Binladin family are related to

you won't find many Roy Whiting's in the Yellow Pages

When i used to be a betting shop manager there was this prolific slow-count conman named Richard Puncheon who was banned from the entire chain of independent betting shops in Hudds and he looked a bit like Roy Whiting so some wag put a pic of Roy next to the A4 poster with "Richard Puncheon is henceforth banned from all branches of Jack Pearson's licensed Turf accts" put up in the office of all the 26 shops and he happened to turn up in this shop one day and kicked off bigstyle with the manager when he saw it!

Alex Kapranos’ real surname is Huntley but after Soham the whole family decided to change to his mum’s maiden name.

Suzanne Moore has left the Guardian and apparently cannot say more than that (yeahright, give it two hours and a bottle of red).

she can't even slope off to Amsterdam for some mushrooms right now poor bairn

Gutted!

— Jess Phillips MP (@jessphillips) November 16, 2020

Was coming here to post that, truly tragic, am sure she’ll have plenty of space on the Spectator/unmissable cow site/The Critic.

If I was a well known columnist, and I had accepted a windfall payout as part of company-wide costcutting, I too would probably like to pretend that I quit on principle.

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) November 16, 2020

you'd have to establish a track record of principles tho

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Em9jDVlW4AEmJ4l?format=png&name=large Owen Jones should sue

lol, of course Jess Phillips is gutted.

Suzanne will be fine.

This thing that the right wing press does of content policing the Guardian is very odd, just very odd indeed https://t.co/VvaKI6OV7F

— Simon (@simonk_133) November 16, 2020

Get her next!

As a reader, I'm devastated that Suzanne is leaving. As a journalist, I'm shocked that others in my profession believe that differing opinions don't belong in a newspaper. Don't agree with something? Write a column, don't personally abuse the writer or try to shut her down https://t.co/Lb03Q5yECb

— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) November 16, 2020

John Harris also kicked off. Ofc the problem is deep.

the idea that being terfy would harm your career at the graun and be a factor in getting paid off seems... fanciful

Well yes

If she has gone because of budget cuts/contract buyout or flounced and is allowing people to say she was hounded out by OJ and/or the ‘trans lobby’ then that’s an extra FRO from me.

Been a Guardian reader for 25 years-ish, and even worked there for about six years (albeit in admin) but I have no idea what a Suzanne Moore column is actually like

Can just about guess from comments though

Hadley F is awful, but they seem to value her for fuck knows what reason.

i think she's from a super wealthy family which seems a big help getting a column gig at the graun cf toynbee, hyde etc.

it's fun to reflect on the fact that Toynbee's dad unbeknowingly used to often get pukingly drunk (I'm talking 6 bottles of gin here!) and trash rooms with a Soviet agent who was arguably one of most productive of the Cambridge 5 (agent Don Cleanteeth)

plz find other kinds of bees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Toynbee#Toynbee_genealogy