Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

No idea who this M4rk S1nk3r fellow is, but that was a very good piece. It made me double check whether today really is Sunday.

I don't know what day it is but I think it might be a leap year now there is some good music writing in the graun.

The Mark S article is well written, and I agree that, in some sense, there is creativity in small-scale 'pranking' internet activity - memes, videos, jokes, etc.

It's less clear to me what the article proposes about the future of pop music.

The article correctly talks about the economic fallout of the pandemic - loss of live revenues, etc.

But what does that imply aesthetically? Why would we think that the pandemic would have any great aesthetic consequence at all?

If you love, say, folk music, then doubtless you've carried on playing, and listening to, folk music, and will do even if one day this terrible pandemic is over.

Same for any other genre: country, heavy metal, house music.

So I don't think I see how the pandemic has presented any interesting shift in the future of pop, apart from the purely negative effect it's had in making some poor musicians poorer.

Zoe Williams has a page today talking about how she is no longer making lockdown resolutions, or any resolutions.

was amused by this clumsy paragraph from a news item earlier today:

"More than half a million people over the age of 80 are to receive letters inviting them to attend one of seven large coronavirus vaccination centres opening in England, where they will be able to book an appointment online or over the phone."

It was a good Mark S article. Perhaps unfairly, it did feel to me at the end that he felt self-pressured that he ought to say something prophetic about possible future.

I couldn’t quite understand that last bit (mea culpa), but there’s always a risk with prophecy that you do something like Parsons/Burchill’s championing of Tom Robinson as the next great hope.

It makes you think.

Yes, lots of the Capitol mob yesterday looked stupid in their fur vests etc: but don't confuse that with "not dangerous".

Trolling and ridiculousness are a hallmark of extremist ideology; it's what stops people realising the threat until it's too late. https://t.co/zBEdilcIsm pic.twitter.com/6KPiIBDGe9

— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) January 7, 2021

She knows whereof she speaks

I really like the comments under Allan Jenkins' gardening column. They seem warm and interested.

after an alarming dip earlier in the week, this is a very good piece

john ganz goes by @lioneltrolling and his tweets are good not bad

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/jan/14/what-have-we-learned-from-trumps-reign-there-are-worse-things-than-being-boring

Chiles is back.

And the silencing of Suzanne Moore continues with a new weekly column in the Telegraph

the Torygraph will give a column to any old riff-raff these days

Wish I could see my Telegraph reading pub buddy and give him a ribbing about this

friendship now ended with ilx adrian chiles is my new best friend

itt: Chiles support

this is something like a personal manifesto isn't it, more than specifically about trump or biden. better than the usual guardian aggro-centrism just for being too gormless to be nasty

that's what it says under his byline

Reminder: he’s in a relationship with the editor.

The sorry tale of how The Guardian tried to cosset the reputation of the known plagiarist, Johann Hari, after the neuroscientist here, Dean Burnett, wrote a Guardian column negatively critiquing a pre-publication excerpt in the Observer from JH's book on depression:

This has come up a few times lately

But it suddenly dawned on me that I'm not employed by the Guardian any more, so can be more honest about how this went down

It's a very strong example of how 'the media' can look after 'their own' so vigorously, no matter the consequences

/1 https://t.co/xGtuk6A0jk

— Dean Burnett (@garwboy) January 22, 2021

it's almost melancholy how we can post garwboy content nowadays without nakhers diving in studs-up and hard

I must have missed this! I don't think I've come across this fellow before.

Is DB controversial himself?

nah not really. nakhers regarded him as profoundly insipid with decent cause but he's almost certainly got admittedly easy target hari and the guardian bang to rights here

Oh, I have come across The Cosmic Shambles Network in the past.

nakh was often a twat for getting annoyed at x for not being some rigorous thinker to the nth degree like he thought he was, no need to parrot that. I remember reading Burnett's piece at the time as a really good write-up.

You get daily reminders of media class behaviour on twitter from them straight, never mind testimony like this.

This is some ridiculous lib framing.

The Trump era wasn't all bad. We saw progress – thanks to social movements | Rebecca Solnit https://t.co/4Hlwna5j33

— The Guardian (@guardian) January 23, 2021

what's a non-ridiculous non-framing

what's a non-ridiculous non-liberal framing

(might be a less incoherent version of the question lol)

?

Rebecca Solnit now a confirmed accelerationist.

"what's a non-ridiculous non-liberal framing"

It's not exactly an answer from me but to look at Trump and say that his presidency pushed these movements onwards, where part of the problem is the inadequate response for what went on before in the Obama-era. That's part of the story which is only hinted at BLM's beginning being dated to 2014.

What would you see as the difference between the Trump era and the Trump presidency?

I am using these terms interchangeably. What's the issue?

andrew's Q wd have rather more force as a gotcha if this guardian hed wasn't extremely deliberately exploiting a (fairly obvious) ambiguity to give a plain statement a frisson of hot-take contrarian perversity

viz (to belabour the point and hammer home the obvious) if the hed read: "the trump presidency wasn't all bad" this wd be unalloyed spiked-style hot-take contrarian perversity

but in fact -- despite the exact temporal overlap of the trump era with the trump presidency -- not everything undertaken during the trump presidency issued from trump adminsitration, or at its behest or indeed with its imprimatur, hence the argument that some things that took place during the "trump era" were not in fact bad bcz trump is NOT a spiked-style take but statement of business as usual in a politics where different forces can clash (which is all politics lol)

for maximum clarity imagine when reading that bcz trump is somehow marked off via punctuation or some other printed signal from what follows it

this is why i am not allowed to write my own heds and straps probably

viz i am too clever and funny

andrew's Q

Didn't see that twist coming!

i thought this bump would be about the guardian article on rolling stone wanting to "shape the future of culture" with "thought leaders"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jan/23/rolling-stone-magazine-culture-council-publication

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial

^^^new (and also silly) name for a long-standing (and also dodgy) mainstream practice

ha, kinder

I mean, in the long history of media and commerce the word is pretty new, but the first paragraph in the Wikipedia entry says it's nearly as old as you, mark!

"advertorial" goes back to the 1940s at least, yes (and hence has been a nuisance my entire professional life): the new and silly name for it is "thought council"!

Ah okay sorry!

okay, i browsed that wiki, mark

i see what you're saying, but i will say that this sounds even worse, as the articles will be paywalled

so you're essentially paying a fee to read advertisements

welcome to the 21st c.?

That actually makes it better, because then I won't accidentally read any of it.

i think more sinister than advertorials are those bill and melinda gates foundation pro-eugenics/development issues pieces

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/27/covid-lies-cost-lives-right-clamp-down-misinformation

This is completely nuts.

in what way?

Politically, legally and pragmatically.

The idea of applying 'trading standards' to the 'marketplace of ideas' is clearly an immensely dangerous precedent to attempt to set, irrespective of how time-limited and expert-led Monbiot imagines it to be. It's illegal to lie to customers, it's not illegal to lie to your neighbours and, clearly, it should not be.

There's also a conflation between lying and 'spreading misinformation'. 5G truthers aren't cynically trying to gain a pecuniary advantage, they genuinely believe what they're saying and think that there's a conspiracy to stop them. Starting from a position that they should be fined or jailed for saying what they believe, incorrectly, to be true, would be immensely counterproductive.

Monbiot positions only the most ridiculous COVID misinformation as worthy of criminal sanction (eg. "COVID doesn't exist") but flags half way through that the bigger problem is with mass-media pundits, who he imagines to be exempt from the laws. If we're looking at public utility as the overriding interest, fining @COVIDTRUTHER69 for saying "Bill Gates wants to inject you with a microchip" on Twitter but trying to argue persuasively against Allison Pearson telling 1m+ people every week that COVID is no big deal and more people will die because of delayed cancer treatment, makes absolutely no sense.

" It (the BBC) thrills to the sound of noisy, ill-informed contrarians."

at least he got one thing right! I think the Monbiot got the Rona himself recently. Lol @ the idea that Hitchens can be reasoned with.