Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Yes, that was, er, weird. I suppose she has a book to sell but I don't know why the Guardian thought that would be a good idea.

I used to get told as a kid: don't put pennies in your mouth, they use them to cover the eyes of corpses in the hospital morgues. Not just a terrible concept, but very unhygienic as well!

so's sticking a rolled-up tenner up your nose but hey

I would guess that it's an attempt to 'reset' - people think she's swimming in money Scrooge McDuck-style, but a bathtub of pennies is closer to the truth, is the message.

I think pinching off people who might be vulnerable then swimming in a bathtub full of pennies is a bit of a problem.

to be clear here the "stealing from vulnerable people" is "not providing higher-tier patreon rewards in time when she was having an addiction crisis, though she's up to date with them now"?

I think the combo of giving lousy nutritional advice, being a melt and grifting cash from some of her constituency who might not be so clued up and might be poor is a pretty fucking shoddy excuse of a career to build tbh. I have zero respect for her.

to be clear here the "stealing from vulnerable people" is "not providing higher-tier patreon rewards in time when she was having an addiction crisis, though she's up to date with them now"?

lol wait is this truly the story? We need to up our standards for what constitutes a grift if so.

how much will that cost me?

Really we should just kill off Patreon

I mean I would probably be bankrupt without it but yeah go off

THere is a Metallophagia specifically dedicated to coins isn't there?
JUst prompted to that thought by a comment above

I sucked a lot of pennies as a kid and I still crave the taste sometimes, it's like blood

they are quite delicious if you microwave them with supermarket brand spaghetti hoops!

After many months of reading Philippa Perry’s agony column, I am beginning to conclude she is unfortunately as superficial as previous incumbent Mariella Frostrup:

(From today’s advice)

Don’t waste another day of not relishing just how fabulous you are. You may not feel confident, but act it, get used to it. You can fake it to make it, and so can I – thanks for the reminder.

Not so much a "I hate The Guardian" as "the sad state of journalism today" but I've been fascinated with Peru lately. A while back I did the whole "move the little figure over Google Maps and look at places picked at random" over Peru, and it's a famously good-looking country. You're alright, Peru! I'd love to hire a scooter and just drive around Peru, spending money here and there in little villages, bringing good cheer to the locals and handing out photographs of Rene Coty.

But a few days later the former President - or actual President at the time - was impeached. But before the vote happened he suspended the government. Thankfully the rule of law stepped in and he was arrested, but Peru has been deadlocked with protests since then. The parallels with events in the United States a couple of years are obvious but Peru seems to have managed thinks much better. Some tourists were stuck on Machu Picchu! How horrible.

You'd think The Guardian would be all over it, but it seems they only have one reporter covering the entire country - a chap called Dan Collyns:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/peru

But he's stuck in a hotel in Lima, and his pieces are just rewrites of Associated Press articles. As far as I can tell the paper hasn't run a single editorial column about it, not a single opinion piece, except this, and even then it's a general state-of-left-wingers-in-South-America piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/30/the-guardian-view-on-latin-americas-left-leaders-pink-tide-could-lift-all-boats

Obviously Peru is on the far side of the world, and so far no British people have been killed, and every other newspaper has the same problem, but the lack of coverage is striking. And it's unlikely that this will explode into nuclear war or even regional war etc. The Guardian and other newspapers have ample space for drivel about toilet rolls and the awful sacrifices involved in working from home with a baby, the columnist's trips to B&Q etc, but not Peru.

Given that the newspaper is currently being hit with a ransomware attack it makes a certain amount of sense that it would be prioritising lightweight puff-pieces, but still. I was struck by this, which is (a) less entertaining than my own posts here at Ilxor (b) I can't understand what the writer is getting at (c) is there space in 2023 for a column that mocks the word "leverage":
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/commentisfree/2023/jan/08/may-i-have-a-word-about-adobes-creative-use-of-language

I think that's what offends me most. Not only could I do a better job than these people, I *am* doing a better job. So are you! I have written better emails than that column, and so have you, probably.

I think pretty much all British newspapers have cut back heavily on foreign correspondents in recent years as circulation has declined. Maybe the solution is to ship Adrian Chiles out to Peru and get him to file reports about the political situation there in addition to his articles about button flies vs zip flies etc

Lol

Dear @cityjournalism, thanks for asking me to come and lecture your students year after year about journalism (for free), and then lecturing me on social media about my lack of journalistic ethics via @jopayton after my interview with @BootstrapCook.

— Simon Hattenstone (@shattenstone) January 8, 2023

very classy to @ her employer in and threaten to withdraw his riveting lectures, what a guy

Oh, the 2021 census results are out, oh here's an article about being gay in the straightest town in the UK, should be interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/09/gay-straightest-town-england-wales-rochford

oh

James Cottis is a Conservative district councillor and property investor

In regards to Peru I don't think Guardian coverage of Latin America (besides Brazil or Argentina) would ever be much to shout about?

Frankly I'd want re-written bland news agency pieces which outlines this or that happened rather than a poor Western Liberal putting their spin on the goings on in that part of the world.

from the 1960s-80s the guardian's primary latin american correspondent was richard gott, who p famously wasn't a "poor western liberal putting their spin on the goings on": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gott

"He resigned from The Guardian in 1994 after claims that he had been a Soviet "agent of influence", a tag Gott denied.[2]" 😂😂😂

Anyway, it's good that some of it might have been worth a read once upon a time.

Here is what they are currently up to.

the guardian's south america correspondent there displaying the perspective and broad grasp of history for which his coverage is known https://t.co/7DjjD35MSB

— Crowsa Luxemburg (@quendergeer) January 9, 2023

in every bbc radio report this morning it included "many voters still consider Lula a criminal"

GVMIC today, with Gaby Hinsliff encouraging Kieth to keep tuition fees, and Simon Jenkins cheering on Wes's NHS privatisation programme.

What is it with right wing liberals and tuition fees? These people are not people

They’ve had 25 years to rationalise pulling up the ladder.

I was once beyond offended to have the ‘it’s different because there were fewer students when I had free tuition’ argument from the barrister who was oposite number to Starmer on the McLibel trial, a guy who was sending his kids to private school and had gentleman’s club memberships (the guy knew my best friend).

I read today that the ransomware attack means it will be "weeks" before anyone can work in the Guardian office at King's Cross?? insane

i'd like to see a big story on all the ransomware events recently (or actually just all of them in toto: how many of them have there been? how many successful?)

but i feel like a lot of them are being kept out of the news the way kidnappers always say "don't call the cops"

A few freelancers I know are waiting for the payroll to be out of ransomeware jail.

Hinsliff is, as I have said before, a baffling figure, in that she is a nobody, famous for no reason, with no talent, liked by nobody, yet who has a prime opinion slot in a major media operation every week. And she usually uses it to say things that are bad, reactionary or offensive.

As I also tried to note before, other commentators are at least not nobodies. Jenkins, Jones, Monbiot, Williams, Harris - they can be good or bad but they are somehow recognisable, they have done something. Hinsliff seems never to have existed except as someone who writes Guardian opinion pieces that she doesn't have any credentials to write.

To be fair, her dad was in an episode of Z-Cars.

Extraordinary!

What have the likes of Jenkins, Jones, Monbiot, Williams, Harris done besides journalism? They aren't that different from Hinsliff.

i think jones and williams actually have the least varied careers: they both went straight into opinion journalism as far as i can tell

monbiot was an investigative reporter first, hinsliff was a political reporter and editor, jenkins was editor of the times and the evening standard nd chairecd the national trust, and harris was editor of er select and knows a lot abt britpop -- this is (or used to be) the normal trajectory, you prove yrself over on the facts side for a few years and then got a gig opining, often via a book that sold reasonably well

Looking at the wikis there is not a lot to distinguish any of them. Oxbridge then journalism of some kind or other, pretty much.

Only Monbiot has done extensive work as an activist. Jones did a stint working for McDonnell but it sounds like gap year work, which is really showing at the moment.

Hinsliff most closely mirrors Jenkins, in that they've done heavy work for the right wing pres

xpost

tbf knowing a lot about Britpop is a solid 10 minutes of endeavour

oh wait (xp) jones was also a trade union lobbyist, a parliamentary researcher for john mcdonnel and helped eric hobsbawm index a book (sorry this info was in a difft section)

tbf knowing a lot about Britpop is a solid 10 minutes of endeavour

― Wyverns and gulls rule my world (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 10 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

He believes Britpop was a shining moment for the UK's music industry, and possibly the end of an era, with (manufactured)[clarification needed] music now deliberately catering for the lowest common denominator. He presented a BBC Four documentary on the musical movement, The Britpop Story.

i guess this was proving himself over on the fiction side for a few years

it was a simpler time, a better time, a whiter time

good prep for going on racist safari in the suburban north

lol i mean i don't like harris's work and i don't like him but i think he's probably the most able of the bunch except for jenkins, who's old and been at the top of the system since i've been alive, so able in a difft way i guess

OJ is the best known socialist journalist or pundit in the country in the last 20 years.

Monbiot is the best known environmentalist in the country.

Jenkins, a knight of the realm I believe, has chaired the National Trust and done lots of such work, edited newspapers, written lots of books, often about architecture and so on.

Harris has a well-known background in pop journalism.

Williams (who rarely writes on the actual opinion pages now) is simply a Guardian staffer but has done it for over 25 years and is known to all Guardian readers, probably even liked by some.

The point for me is not that these are good people, but that they (less so Williams) are distinctive characters with bodies of work (OJ's 3 books for instance, SJ's and GM's several books); UK media personalities in a way, whom one could quite easily parody.

Almost no-one could identify a distinctive character to Hinsliff, or attribute a body of work to her. You couldn't even seriously write a parody of her, because there is nothing there to parody, except empty, reactionary so-called 'centrism'.

Even the fact that one has often seen the others on TV or heard them on radio is a criterion here. Has anyone ever seen or heard Hinsliff on TV or radio? (I hope not.)

she used to present The Big Breakfast iirc

Pop journalism isn't really a thing to be known for (sorry mark 🤣) unless you have avidly read the press or like indie pop. Most of the music papers he wrote for are dead.

Hinsliff has written a book and I can see her doing bollocks like chairing the National Trust. She is 30 years younger than Jenkins.

I'd back her. Hinsliff actually is fairly distinguished:

"After two years at the Grimsby Evening Telegraph from 1994 to 1996, Hinsliff joined the Daily Mail, where she was successively a news reporter and health reporter, before becoming a political reporter in 1997,[4] and finally chief political correspondent the following year. She joined The Observer in March 2000, initially in the same post, following Andy McSmith, who had joined The Daily Telegraph.[5] Hinsliff was the youngest political editor of a national newspaper when she was promoted in December 2004, this time succeeding Kamal Ahmed, who had been her immediate superior at The Observer since her original appointment.[4][5][6]"

no one can look me up on wikipedia and that's good not bad

no one can look me up on wikipedia and that's good not bad

There are two people on Wikipedia with my name, and neither of them is me. One is a former Church of England archdeacon and the other is a former US football player.