Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

He's from Burnley, he speaks 'ow do.

I've worked in Burnley before and never met anyone who speaks with a Campbell accent.

Turns out he's actually from Yorkshire!

ffs!

I know someone whose wife is doing some architecture work for him. His partner is very nice. That's all the gossip I've got.

ffs!

My friend Esther is very active in Holborn and St Pancras CLP and the Campbell/Millar house has been the site of a few parties. Their guest loo is wallpapered in tabloid splashes about AC.

fws!

looking forward to Make Me A War Criminal

lock the doors

Important update on the Guardian heatwave liveblog by @rachela_hall. https://t.co/p22P5Kj8ve pic.twitter.com/nCklGA1Lnq

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) July 18, 2022

cunt writes for cunts about cunts, delighting cunts

‘Conservatives are so irredeemably split they removed Boris Johnson only to find they could not unite behind a replacement…’

✍️ Nick Cohenhttps://t.co/OdgRgS2iBq

— The Spectator (@spectator) July 18, 2022

really trying his damndest to carry on calmly posting as he usually does after his position should be untenable at this fucking point.

(xp) Stunning insights from the vile sex pest there.

great to see the media establishment straining every sinew to maintain omerta around a serial harasser and bully who doesn't even know how to spell straitjacket

On Novara but I'll put it here. They are expanding.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/novara-media-donors/

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/25/tim-westwood-faced-bullying-allegation-inside-bbc-while-radio-1-dj

It's really bad when a large media organisation suppresses serious whistleblowing accusations. Now, let's have a look and see who's in this week's opinion pages...

This is what one Guardian comms ed is getting up to on twitter:

If this isn't exaggerating and weaponising antisemitism against the left, I don't know what is.

Unsurprisingly, @SiamGoorwich works for the Guardian. This is standard practice at that right-wing-pretending-to-be-left-wing rag. pic.twitter.com/ep1MBasv83

— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@WarmongerHodges) July 25, 2022

After tweeting about Nick Cohen and Guardian News and Media (GNM’s) attempts to discourage complaints from W1 and W2, I received a number of messages from other women wanting to talk about how life is at GNM. 🧵

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) July 28, 2022

This was funny.

1/ If silly people could just stop writing silly things about things they've only done confirmation bias google searches on, the rest of us would have a lot more time to watch Stranger Things.

Alas.

Let's go paragraph by paragraph. pic.twitter.com/yBBMDMRgfL

— Dmitry Grozoubinski (@DmitryOpines) July 29, 2022

Jenkins is never afraid to pie himself in the face

Really good thing about twitter is how there is a rebuttal to any single piece of nonsense published on the day.

lol, that was a very thorough rinsing. If they had a reputation to protect they'd nuke the article.

I found it interesting that just after the invasion of Ukraine the newspaper published several pieces by Simon Jenkins about the war - along the lines of "NATO's aggression has backfired / we must lift sanctions on Russia" - and then he seemed to lose interest in the topic. I remember wondering if the editor had told him to knock it off. Or if the editor was sick of him writing essentially the same piece over and over again.

For example all but two of his columns from March were about the war, and one of the other stories was about the uselessness of sanctions (albeit against Iran):
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/simonjenkins?page=2

But in April he only wrote two stories on the topic, and none at all in May, two in June, one in July. And most of them are really about domestic politics, only tangentially Ukraine.

When I saw "he wrote" I don't know how the editorial process works with opinion columnists in a national newspaper. Perhaps he wrote lots of pieces that were rejected, or perhaps the editor gave him a list of topics to cover. I just don't know. But it seems odd that with the war raging he decided not to cover it.

jenkins has been staunchly anti-interventionist for a long time which has made him right by default on foreign policy a lot of the time and i used to rate him for that but it’s become increasingly clear that he very often just doesn’t know wtf he’s talking about

Thank you @pressgazette for breaking an industry silence on this and for including some points from me. It's good to talk as BT used to say. https://t.co/oMiP3Fs3Fa

— lucy siegle (@lucysiegle) August 2, 2022

bravo to GMG for such a fast response

hey it's not like there's over a decade of reports on this scumbag's behaviour

He'll get plenty of work in The Spectator anyway.

hmmm

I don't think this is why Nick Cohen has been suspended @Telegraph pic.twitter.com/zwyoMmroiG

— Moya Lothian-McLean (@mlothianmclean) August 2, 2022

This guy is such a transphobic pest.

Hopefully this is the beginning of a change in athletic sports.

World Triathlon to allow transgender women to keep competing in female category.

However testosterone must now be less than 2.5nmol/L for 2yrs. And 4yrs "must have elapsed since the transgender athlete has competed as a male in any sporting competition”https://t.co/3vHhUM6XBS

— Sean Ingle (@seaningle) August 3, 2022

Told some friends I was going to Turf Moor and they thought I'd become an Observer columnist

— Juliet. (@zinovievletter) August 12, 2022

devastating satire of the guardian lifestyle section in (checks notes)...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2022/aug/13/wild-swimming-its-bloody-horrible-stephen-collins-cartoon

wild swimming has been declared passé, since Laura Barton discovered bouldering whilst staying at a friend's spare house in Hebden Bridge

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/16/britain-has-been-avoiding-its-biggest-problems-for-decades-now-were-paying-the-price

Tim_Robinson_Hotdog.jpg

the mealy-mouthed requests for more "consensus" are absolutely infuriating

You need to registererase every John Harris opinion 2015-2019 from memory to keep reading

something quite sad about this one

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/16/bring-that-beat-back-why-are-people-in-their-30s-giving-up-on-music

among the many things daniel dylan ray gets wrong here is that indie sleaze did not originally exist. it most certainly did! i have the metaphorical scars to prove it. made by studded white belts of course

I am unsure what that is, though interested that Tracer Hand was into it.

I think this article is fundamentally confused about 'enjoying music' vs 'getting into new music'. It is true that many older people, though not all, no longer get into new music, or music new to them. This is partially true for a great many of us, though it seems rarely to be wholly true; just a matter of degree. But it still wouldn't follow that the same people don't care about music at all. They might, in principle, be as passionate as ever about the music they loved aged 21.

If you don't resolve that ambiguity, as he doesn't, then the whole argument can't go anywhere.

There remains, I think, something interesting about the contrast between music and other arts here. He says 'what are you listening to?' has been replaced by 'what are you watching?', but doesn't think that if the former's loss is bad, the latter's gain might be good, and a sign that people still do like experiencing (new) stories.

"I’ve not been able to give away free tickets to see Nick Cave, staggeringly expensive arena pop shows, or even entire festival weekend passes."

Well, you couldn't pay me $100 a minute to do any of these things, but that doesn't mean my enthusiasm for music has waned. That entire piece is framed through a "keeping up with pop" mindset, which frankly, fuck that.

I mean, "incredible cost of participation" seems like an obvious axis that hasn't been considered by this article.

Outside of streaming, recorded music and live music are hideously expensive. Going to shows = babysitting = more expense. Houses and flats get smaller and smaller - where do you fit that stereo system in an 1 bedroom that's been converted into a 2.5 bedder with a tiny kitchen that's now also an "open plan living room"? Etc

Also ageing hearing = guitars sound worse and heavy bass is intolerable

And this also seems part of the "no one goes to the cinema anymore" story, which was happening well before the pandemic

Etc

Also ageing hearing = guitars sound worse and heavy bass is intolerable

i would say heavy bass gets more tolerable / desirable with ageing hearing.

i go to a lot of gigs and it is very noticeable that if it is anything quite new i will usually be the oldest person by some margin. if it is some long standing / classic act i will be in the median age group and there will generally be almost nobody under 30.

Jobs, babies, houses, more babies.

ffs it's been happening for as long as people have been getting a good job, getting married, having kids, settling down etc etc. I hope he didn't get paid for that.

100% agree but the the ratio of wages-to-cultural expenses is definitely much more prohbitive than it was 15, 20, 30 years ago

That should be wages/cost of living and rent/music

As someone in her thirties, an unsaid portion of this is (if you’re talking strictly about London) is how many people are moving out/away in greater numbers even more so than the usual cycle. Ten years ago the majority of people I know lived in/around zones 2-4 and it was much easier to make plans. Lots of us have bought and moved out or just moved away. For me to go to anything in London strongly depends how much I’m inclined to get a late train home (especially if I am by myself). Meeting up with my friend groups even just for dinner or something is hard. So when you make time, you make time. Spontaneity is difficult.

Was also thinking this on similar lines recently when I read this NYmag old piece about their Gossip Girl coverage.

She also piped up to say the show’s travel time to Brooklyn was unrealistic, which she knew about because, get this, in 2007, she was the only blogger in the office who didn’t live in Manhattan.

Is the Guardian music worse than it used to be?

Imagine the differences if this had been published by the UK rather than the Australian wing of the paper:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/aug/17/ellia-green-former-australian-rugby-sevens-star-olympic-gold-medallist-comes-out-as-trans-man

UK headline would at least start with the word "controversy"

I don't have the heart to find out whether the usual are complaining about erasing women, pretending he's actually a trans woman, or doing both at once somehow. but I'll probably have to hear about it soon anyway