Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

the guardian really hates black people

Appalling from Pidd.

Anti black racism is a vote winner in this country. What else is there to say?

i missed all the bru-ha-ha over the sainsbury's christmas advert, only catching the ch4 pushback during one ad break. was quite shocked when i heard. then surprised that i was.

Is Private Eye worse than it used to be?

Private Eye has named the Guardian trans activist 'misogynist' who Suzanne Moore complained about (a complaint that wasn't dealt with), because he called her an insecure bigot after she asked him if they could be civil with each other. His name is Owen Jones pic.twitter.com/GRW5pIEaxY

— ripx4nutmeg (@ripx4nutmeg) December 2, 2020

sorry for rt-ing this individual, can't see where else the Private Eye article is being shared

One of many reasons why my Private Eye subscription is not being renewed for the first time in a decade.

just copy the image address and post as IMG if you don't want to give a twitter shit-poster more attention than they deserve. I think the Eye has always been bad, we just didn't used to notice as much or maybe when we were less online and perhaps more starved of "political satire" type content.

the typeset is so small, last time I bought a print edition I was struggling to read it with my reading glasses on.

Ugh, don’t read the replies. Only one of these people has a reputation for getting blootered and aggressive at media parties and it ain’t OJ. Also: who is enough of an egoiste to email another freelancer before a party demanding civility? AFAIK neither were previously horrible to one another in social settings, so I can only deduce SOMEONE had an idea to get pissed and confrontational, and refer back to this email to ‘prove’ some kind of olive branch was not taken up.

I have some back issues of Private Eye from the mid-1980s and it has a horrible sneering anti-left tone to it under Ingrams which isn't familiar from when I read it in the 90s and early 2000s. Haven't read it in a long time, but had heard it was doing some good investigative journalism in last decade.

Talking of aggressive drunks, only one of them got beaten up by some as a result of being a hate figure in the right wing media.

Still a few cracked ribs is nothing compared to being unable to find any paid work for half an hour.

does private eye always have awful ‘serious’ pieces like this in between the racism, gay jokes and pleb bashing? I’ve never read it

idk how to respond to this shit but really anything would be self defence at this point. this country is so horrible and its media keeps making it worse every day

The 'loos not being flushed' thing...could this possibly be to do with just fewer people having been in the office over the last few months for some reason?

xp it has various news sections with a "sardonic" tone, political cartoons, full-page parodies of different newspapers / columns, a letters page full of in-jokes and a wacky classifieds section at the back (I'm guessing it hasn't changed in the last couple of decades)

It has always been bad and has probably got worse

It's about where you'd expect, politically, for a magazine that has employed Nick Cohen to write anonymous columns bitching about his colleagues and The Left for over a decade.

There's about three pages of genuinely important news / journalism per issue, which is three more than most 'serious' papers can manage, but not worth trawling through.

Ugh, don’t read the replies. Only one of these people has a reputation for getting blootered and aggressive at media parties and it ain’t OJ. Also: who is enough of an egoiste to email another freelancer before a party demanding civility? AFAIK neither were previously horrible to one another in social settings, so I can only deduce SOMEONE had an idea to get pissed and confrontational, and refer back to this email to ‘prove’ some kind of olive branch was not taken up.

xp the In the Back section is still an outlet for serious investigative journalism in the spirit of Paul Foot, and does redeem it somewhat

it sounds very shit. the covers are just pitiful as well

its pretty dire but in the context of uk media generally its excellent

did not know it was super terfy tho

my housemate used to get it quite often and i once bought it in desperation for something to read before getting on a long train journey and i dont remember being totally appalled

Transphobia seems a strange hill to die on for these people. Not having knowingly read (or at least taken any notice of) anything Suzanne Moore's ever written, is it genuine yet misplaced feminism, icky discomfort or "I was gifted an expensive education and don't like being told I'm wrong" middle-class condescension?

Very much the latter.

Labour shouldn’t fall out over Brexit: it ought to focus on what happens next
Peter Mandelson

ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha love too be gaslit lads

Not to excuse it I think there's a tone deafness and ignorance at play rather than explicit trans/terfiness and goes back to what we discussed here (?) last week. Like if you aren't active and engaged in trans activism and don't fully understand a lot of the nuance you have this thing where you don't get why people suddenly don't support what you always thought were lefty feminists who talk about protecting women and say things like "supporting women's sex based rights" because you aren't reading the code.

Not as feminist as she thinks she is, based on popping off at younger trans-allied women who have a similar standing. And the whole Diane Abbott thing. During the first flush of anti-austerity/student protests she made an effort to schmooze with a lot of up-and-comers who are my friends and now she’s all angry in an ‘I welcomed you, how dare you ignore my current bullshit’ when they criticise her and other phobes on socials.

How ANYONE my age in polmedia can socialise with, much less employ that handsy prick NC while insisting people on their left are somehow wanting ethically, I will never know.

PE has p much always been this messy mix of toxic upper-end gossip and feuds plus serious reporting plus crappy rote parody for the commuters: it basically works as the "free speech" dumpzone of stories that the papers won't take, and that has always included unsourced spite and feuds ("what everyone in the industry knnows but isn't telling the public") as well as the occasional actually valuable investigation. the covers haven't really been any good since the 70s -- it's a format they evidetnly feel they're stuck with as a selling point to their most casual readers (which is bored and tired commuters) who are probably also the biggest part of their readership. back in the 70s there was still a breakthrough energy to this cheekiness i guess; since the 80s its increasingly become the establishment media tone (with spitting image and hignify -- both never-not fkn dreadful -- cementing it as a pervasive bedrock journo cynicism)

on twitter solomon hughes is a useful uncynical filter for the investigation element (he also works for the morning star, which is possibly even terfier ffs, but it's a trade-off some radical journalists feel they have to continue to make for the sake of being published at all in outlets that other journalists pay attention to, and also being paid)

(which is also a cynicism i guess, but a very different one: (it's not a trade-off i'd make but i have never uncovered an important scandal in my life so…, plus i can barely get work in this industry even correcting spelling these days so who is to say what the one true radical way is -- maybe i shd change my name to Even Lefter)

transphobia seems to be a requirement for UK media, from the morning star upwards/rightwards

there is some kind of sadistic desire/release/gratification thing going on at the core this stuff which seems to have its own momentum & be its own motivation now. I don’t think the bad analysis that accompanies/justifies it usually addresses these motivations except accidentally. the bad analysis (or code) needs enough of this desire to be convincing enough to actually work effectively. it’s like when the BBC keeps platforming fascist talking points, it works, & it means something even if every individual incident really was just a naive mistake

Yes, especially as the naive mistakes (being generous) are being massively amplified by an online army of arseholes.

expanding on better routes into info: i think i came to hughes via alistair morgan -- an ordinary citizen who has FPBE spasms but is primarily on twitter campaigning to get his brother daniel's 1987 murder properly investigated, in a case that profoundly involves the met, sneior editors at various tabloids, gangsters and murderous corruption right at the heart of the political-media-state-violence nexus (lol sorry, rewrite this in non trot-bingo jargon if you please).

even morgan's FPBE-ism largely evolves from so absolutely distrusting pre-corbyn-led labour that he never stopped being suspicious it could shrug that off (and judging by its response to his campaigns it never did: corbs-labour was very mealy-mouthed indeed abt police reform) (let alone abolition) -- the idea that PE is the only place ordinary punters might ever even glimpse this story is i guess the paul foot-ish dimension to the justification of its continued existence, achieved at editorial cost of them just running whatever other nonsense feuding ppl take to them w/o deep-checking. i think it's a moral rationale that possibly doesn't survive the internet (lol glenn greenwald e.g. vehently disagrees) but there you go, it was a posh-boy rile-daddy prank from the outset and it's pure luck that a good posh boy (foot) was pals with the far less acceptable ones to made it happen (ingrams)

xps to onimo SM goes way beyond that and has been doing so for a while

“People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me." - Suzanne Moore in 2013, afer (predominently cis) people questioned her use of a racist, transphobic stereotype in an article. Here's my response from the time. https://t.co/CbNRbHWtQa

— Dr Ruth Pearce (@NotRightRuth) March 3, 2020

Yes gyac I know she has form there - I was sort of meaning how SM's transphobic language can pass under the radar of pubs like PE without being picked up or highlighted as exactly that.

Whoever wrote the PE nib used ‘women’s sex-based rights’ in their copy so RED FLAG.

PE was p much ground zero in the UK for anti-vaxxer info-dump work before wakefield was exposed and disgraced -- in the 90s i guess (lockdown has fucked my sense of time) it published three or four (possibly more) extensive pull-out specials on "why MMR is harming our kids" which absolutely firmed up middle class suspicion towards the "medical establishment and what it isn't telling us".

as far i know beyond retrospective eye-rolling it has never seriously been called on this -- it's a point where "licensed cheeky gadfly" and "we publish what others dare not" and "Qanon here we GOOOO" all begin to fuse

in conclusion willy rushton did brexit

PE possibly the largest remaining purchaser of single-panel gag cartoons - yet somehow all their regular comic strips are truly terrible, and some of them have been terrible for years on end.

there is only one good cartoonist and that is matt (who today certainly nails it again)

does he nail it to a cock and balls face?

Now this element of their 90's history is not something I've seen mentioned before. Lol even though I can't remember reading the anti-vaxxer shit in the Eye, but it might have subliminally brainwashed me because in the early 00's I paid privately for my kid to have some French separate vaccinations, something that would feel quite embarrassing now if I still bothered with getting embarrassed about my past!

in the early 00s we had a very short conversation about how my mum got scared off the whooping cough vaccination in the 70s and almost killed me and my brother so my kids were getting their effing jabs

yeah I got a bad dose of the whooping cough in the 70's as well

I don't know what the equivalent of mumsnet was back then, I think someone told my mum a story that vaccines are the devil's way of stealing bairn's souls or something!

Whoever wrote the PE nib used ‘women’s sex-based rights’ in their copy so RED FLAG.

Transphobia seems a strange hill to die on for these people.

Indeed but that is very much the way things are.

huge amounts of "i achieved exactly the correct level of anti-racism and anti-sexism in 1985, and anything that today calls that into question is merely the enemy we alone faced then"

also clustering round the-fave-you-always-trust as best curator of the vim to be bold abt yr unorthdox certainties (long after they've turned out to be very reactionary certainities): the clouds of epigones are cowards who only run in packs

lol i am subtweeting ppl who probably still think of me as a chum from the old days here :| X(

"i achieved exactly the correct level of anti-racism and anti-sexism in 1985"

measured in units of 80's pc'ness known as ben-eltons - and piss off Outspan!