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Who needs a book called News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World written by Alan Rusbridger? Probably not anyone who’s likely to buy it. The audience for books by journalists tends to be made up of people who already read a lot of journalism, and think about it a great deal; there’s a very good chance that a lot of them are themselves journalists. The people who need guides on how to use journalism are unlikely to be buying books at all. They’re on Facebook, snorting up little packets of conspiracy and untruth until they’re thoroughly high on paranoia.
Rusbridger should be uniquely qualified to map the modern news world, because he played a unique part in building it as Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian from 1995 to 2015. Like every editor in that period, he had to survive the internet, and the transformation it wrought in the economics and values of news. But unlike any of his peers, Rusbridger turned his editorship into a philosophy. His reign was defined not just by the big stories (phone hacking, Wikileaks, Snowden — all great examples of the sheer thrill of disclosure that drives a good editor), but by a credo: he believed in “open journalism”.
“Open journalism”, as he defined it in 2012, means “journalism which is fully knitted into the web of information that exists in the world today. It links to it; sifts and filters it; collaborates with it and generally uses the ability of anyone to publish and share material to give a better account of the world.” As The Guardian expanded its website, “open journalism” found expression in the voracious Comment is Free opinion section (once a raging stream of opinion that tried to capture the energy of oughts-era blogging, now just a URL pointing to a fairly traditional op-ed page); in liveblogging, which remains a strength of the paper; and in below-the-line comments that were not just tolerated but encouraged and celebrated.
Some of it was silly (a page allowing readers to generate messages of praise for then-security columnist Glenn Greenwald was so embarrassingly sycophantic that it seems to have been quietly shuffled off the Guardian website). Some of it was admirable — Comment is Free gave professional inroads to a lot of writers who might otherwise have been left on the outside of political journalism, and as I was one of them, I can’t be too churlish about its faults.
Some of it was probably damaging. A below-the-line breakdown from 2012 revealed that at least a fifth of the Guardian’s comments were made by 0.0037% of the actual audience. By any reckoning, that’s not a representative segment of the readership — yet comments took on outsize importance for editors, with writers expected to “jump on the thread” and defend their work. But it all helped to form what journalism would be in the era of the internet: though there’s been some movement away from comments, with readers and writers slugging it out on Twitter instead, it’s still the default for news sites (including this one) to offer instant right-of-reply. Rusbridger’s Guardian helped shape that default.
More significantly, it helped shape the expectation that news would be free. Paywalls are the opposite of open journalism, and the Guardian’s business model remains one of voluntary contributions. For Rusbridger, there’s a political imperative to this: democracies depend on having “informed citizens”, he writes. But there’s a counterargument that’s worth considering, even if it might seem a bit hypocritical to put it forward on a free-to-read site as UnHerd is for the time being (though there are plans to charge in the future). A public that is used to getting all its news for nothing has no reason to value journalism, no price to put on the truth. How does the naïve reader clock that a crank website like Exaro (now-defunct promotor of false sexual abuse claims) is worth less than heavyweight investigative journalism that is equally free to read?
In theory, News and How to Use It should be the perfect primer for such audiences. But as Rusbridger notes in the introduction, “journalism has, it seems to me, always struggled to describe itself honestly, if at all” — and this book is not entirely an exception. Reading its A-to-Z entries, there’s little clue that the author is an architect of the media as much as an observer. In an entry on “Gatekeeping”, he discusses the “Steele dossier” — the lurid oppo research on Trump that was leaked in 2017. “The New York Times (and several others) didn’t publish. Buzzfeed did. Who was right?” I don’t know, but I feel like Rusbridger should share his opinion on the matter. Or, at least, tell us what he would have done if it had happened on his watch.
Too often, he trails off into indecisive platitudes or empty exclamations: “time will tell”, “change will come… slowly”; something on one page “couldn’t matter more”, while something on the next page “couldn’t be more urgent”. Perhaps, ungenerously, this vagueness is because Rusbridger no longer has the answers. His references on theory of journalism are noughties-heavy. He debunks the “filter bubble” criticism of social media (what could be more of a filter bubble, he asks, than an old-style printed paper), but doesn’t mention the growing understanding that seeking out material you disagree with can actually heighten polarisation. (There’s a reason one of my most reliable Comment is Free pitch genres was “Daily Mail does awful thing”.)
Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis — two early cheerleaders for the internet who influenced the development of “open journalism” — both feature, but there’s no reckoning with how the last decade has tested their optimism. Shirky’s thesis in his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody was that the internet would democratise expertise with the demise of gatekeeping; Jarvis argued for “digital first” journalism supplemented by a high-quality print product. But gatekeeping feels less disposable once you’ve felt the effects of Covid conspiracies and QAnon; and Rusbridger’s beautiful Berliner-format Guardian was one of the first targets of his replacement, Kath Viner. Faced with the urgent challenge of making The Guardian not just innovative but sustainable, she binned the expensive presses in favour of standard tabloid size.
It’s inevitable that a book about journalism is vulnerable to be overtaken by events. Still, a reference to “Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore” is a particularly glaring casualty of deadlines. Last week, Moore quit the paper, where she has clearly been unhappy since at least March, when 338 of her colleagues across The Guardian and The Observer signed a letter denouncing “transphobic content” which clearly targeted her. Rusbridger mentions online abuse of Moore by the Right-winger James Delingpole; I’d be much more interested in reading what he has to say about her treatment by her peers, and the newsroom culture he left behind.
Rusbridger seems strangely insulated from the partisan strains on journalists: he still sees social media as a kind of ad-hoc ombudsman, resented only by those hacks who shrink from scrutiny (“No longer can the biters have immunity from being bitten back”). This will be bitterly hilarious to anyone who’s enjoyed the kind of “scrutiny” that comes in the form of death and rape threats. News and How to Use It is less a guidebook than a monument to a lost ideal. In the first decade of this century, Rusbridger was something like a prophet of news; his legacy, for good and bad, deserves a sharper eye than this book can bring to bear.
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SubscribeThe guardian is a sewer of a publication.
1 day of reading their opinion pieces would make you shudder with their views on ordinary working class people who don’t think their way.
A nasty publication that hates anyone not like them
You should be able to separate news reporting from opinion pieces (like your comment).
What paper is worth reading – according to you?
None of them
The trouble is, the line between news and opinion is blurred. The news in the Guardian and Telegraph used to be similar but it really isn’t these days…
I don’t think there is a paper worth reading in the round any more, although of course there are some journalists and commentators worth following across the piece.
That said, I did hear yesterday of a new (printed) paper in the West Country called ‘The Light’. Apparently it has been set up in response to the endless lies and censorship practiced by the govt and Big Tech with regard to Covid.
Funnily enough I had said to myself just recently that, at some point, people would start circulating samizdat leaflets or whatever in the UK, given that we are no allowed to speak or access the truth in the MSM or online.
At the Guardian they are not at all separate.
The stopped doing actual news reporting years ago, now most of the content is just “someone on Twitter is outraged by Donald Trump”.
I agree. I read it occasionally just to see how ridiculous their views are on so many topics. Most news publications are poor but The Grauniad is the worst by a few lengths.
Until around ten years ago I still bought The Guardian – the physical newspaper – on a regular basis. It was the last newspaper I consumed in this way. Today I will not even go to the free website, so deranged and repulsive has it become. Apparently Sonia Sodha has written three articles criticising Sunitra Gupta, the esteemed scientist who is against lockdowns. And don’t get me started on the likes of Afua Hirsch, Owen Jones, Polly Toynbee and so many others.
Like, the BBC, The Guardian hates Britain and it hates the West, freedom and democracy.
Some good news for you. The Guardian sacked Owen Jones.
Aside from his being an obnoxious so-and-so, do we know why The Guardian canceled Jones? Or was it just one of their regular lay-offs for financial reasons?
But yes, I had heard something about this, and Mayhar Tousi showed a video in which Jones touts his new podcast. I, for one, will not be watching,
There are very few books I will confess that I didn’t finish. I nearly gave up on “Solaris” by Stanilaw Lem (the original film captures the book perfectly), “The Gulag Archipelago” I stopped around page 450 but “Chavs” by Owen Jones, I didn’t get through the preface……
I thought ‘Solaris’ was an excellent book, but found that the original film bore very little relation to the book.
I watched the original Tarkovsky film again recently. I remember it being shown late at night on BBC2 (back when the BBC paid some attention to its Reithian mission to inform, educate and entertain) and thought it was very boring. I was young then – now I can see it’s a rather good film, but not as good as Mirror or Stalker.
Surely you didn’t buy it?
Fake news, surely!
He hasn’t been sacked, just had his Youtube channel taken down. I can see how quickly fake news spreads :-).
That’s good because anyone with half a brain hates the BBC and the Guardian!
It’s breathtaking arrogance by Sodha, and typical of Guardian writers’ tendency to attribute the worst possible motivations to people they don’t like, to take the least charitable view of others possible.
On a similar note, I particularly liked the opinion piece by no-mark columnist Arwa Mahdawi claiming that Elon Musk hasn’t really achieved anything.
52 upvotes. Wow! that must be about half the commentators here. 52 (and counting) think that the BBC and the Guardian hate Britain, the West, freedom and democracy.Not “the BBC is overly critical of the Tory govt and the Guardian is too PC for my liking” but that they “hate” Britain and democracyNothing personal Fraser, but I’ve never heard so much gibberish.It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
It’s sad because it’s true.
I used to love the Guardian, particularly CiF back around when it began, as it was largely responsible for me taking a real interest in nuts and bolts economics, mainly thanks to the writings of the excellent at the time, Larry Elliott.
I also used to love reading a couple of what I viewed as enlightened and enlightening CiF posters on there, Kim Driver and Jimmymurphybrassneck, if memory serves, plus the ‘counterpoint’ musings of the ‘right wingish’ Captain Grey whose slightly sinister looking avatar was a actually a black and white picture of Captain Scarlet.
It was all mostly friendly and good-natured and the moderators let people have their say, only intervening when strictly necessary.
Things started to get nasty around the 2015-16 mark with Brexit and Trump so I chose to leave.
A wise ‘move’ further validated when during a recent ill-advised visit there I saw a couple of my genuinely measured, albeit contrary to the ‘popular’ narrative comments either instantly deleted by the moderators or seized upon by a ravening pack of posters with vicious, nasty replies which so obviously transgressed its own rules and yet, funnily enough, pretty much all went unmoderated.
Comment might well still be ‘free’ in The Guardian, but sadly speech very obviously isn’t any longer.
I have twice been banned from CiF. To be fair, I probably deserved it the first time. But the second expulsion followed nothing more than a few comments that ran contrary to The Guardian’s narrative. For instance, I stated that fruit and vegetables are incredibly cheap by historical standards so there is no reason why anyone should be unable to eat perfectly healthy meals on a limited budget. And that was the last comment I was ever allowed to make on CiF.
Twice, eh, who’s a naughty boy?
In retrospect I wish I had too.
It’s definitely something to be more proud of than ashamed of nowadays.
All you have to do is admit you voted for Brexit and you’ll be gone.
I’m not surprised you were banned with loose talk about fruit and veg on CiF. I’ve never actually been banned but had plenty of comments removed. I don’t know if it’s common perception but some columnists seem to have more rigorous moderating than others.
I’m in pre-mod at the moment, because I responded sarcastically to an opinion piece by some writer – not one of the Guardian regulars – saying that art was a good vehicle for boosting “ethnocultural empathy”.
I couldn’t have cared less about the article had it not started its third paragraph with the following claim: “Racism against Black people has been a prominent feature of many of this year’s main crises, yet surprisingly it never seems to be addressed.”
Both parts of that sentence are entirely false, yet it’s presented as though it’s almost a truism. Even more astonishingly, this claim was supposed to refer to the UK.
Naturally, I presented quite a long list of this year’s major crises, none of which have had anything to do with “racism against black people”.
Heresy will evidently not be tolerated!
Ooh, but was it vicious sarcasm? I mean Quaseem Soulemani may have nailed your head to the ceiling but he was ever such a gentleman.
I think I’ve been banned three times now, not so much for disagreeing with the Graun consensus, but rather for employing a certain amount of cheeky banter while doing so. The left have turned awfully thin skinned. I think they genuinely believe that CIF must be a safe space, which is why so few articles enable comments, the Graun can’t afford to pay 500 moderators to keep pace
I once made a comment on an article by Frankie Boyle in which the title was “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare was to be reborn as Donald Trump”, or something like that. I commented that Frankie Boyle’s worst nightmare was to be reborn as Frankie Boyle. I was told that my comment didn’t meet their standards and would not be allowed. Can you believe that one?
Actually I think I got pre-modded by pasting in my comment a section from the article and questioned why the journalist would write something like that, I the thing the journalist wrote was something disparaging to Brexit voters & I was questioning why the rhetoric was so hostile and want needed.
The time when they allowed comment on nearly everything was both a golden age and hilarious to watch. It was somewhere that you could discuss *anything* that was going on, often intelligently but not always, and the discussion below the line was often of a higher standard that above the line.
The problem was that so much of it so vehemently disagreed with the house stance on things, that it had to be stopped.
The figure given above is part of it – a small group of noisemakers accounted for a large part of the noise, but the other part is surely that intelligent commenters were far too good at pointing out the low standard of debate promoted by the staff, particularly on their opinion pieces.
Now they only open up comments on a few select issues, it’s not half as compelling as it used to be.
It’s run by authoritarian cowards, so there are many topics it simply won’t allow dissent on.
True. I have usually found better information in the comments than in the article.
Even from the other side of the pond I visit the Guardian site from time to time if for no other reason than to determine if the tail-lights on the Marxist Micro Bus are still visible as it chugs off into the stratosphere.
Our very own CBC is also very selective on allowing comments which is rather bold of them considering they are tax-payer funded.
You can easily tell from the header if comments are allowed on a story or op-ed which of course means you can tell what editorial position they wish to protect from contrarians.
IMO, it is also a demonstration of another nasty tactic; Bigotry of Low Expectations.
They clearly consider it their duty to protect certain groups that they have arbitrarily decided just can’t handle criticism.
Personally, I spend very little time on news or opinion sites that do not invite comments – I learn more that way, about the publication, the writer and the readers.
The misanthropy, general negativity and socialist dogma are so toxic that whenever I go there now I strictly limit my time to protect my mental health. It’s like a 4chan for liberals without the humour.
I’m not sure they’d call themselves “liberals” as it seems liberals are despised left and right these days. The guardian set berate liberals as free-market true believers. It’s not safe to be liberal anywhere these days…
Mr Smith concurs, and his dear friend Mr Hume is less than amused at his eviction from his home. What is a fellow to do?
I remember being very impressed by a commenter called MoveAnyMountain, who would hold his ground brilliantly against the most savage onslaughts.
I too remember him, and I too was very impressed by the very high standard of his comments. The Guardian had some kind of a competition to choose the best commenter of the year and, much to my surprise,and to the general disgust of the other commenters, he won. After that he simply disappeared i.e. he completely stopped commenting. One can only hope there was nothing sinister in this.
Yep. And Commander Keen. AllyF. There were loads of really good commentators and it doesn’t have to be representative, it just has to be interesting content. Trouble was, they often didn’t agree with the Guardian narrative so clearly had to be silenced…
“It was all mostly friendly and good-natured and the moderators let people have their say, only intervening when strictly necessary.”
I was censored there repeatedly for posting awkward, though relevant facts. The rag is a joke.
I managed to get banned from the Guardian Science Section for posting something that was “against community values”. And all I said was – below an astronomy article – ‘black dwafs matter’.
I got banned for nothing more than outlining that the country voted twice for Brexit, I’ve been on pre mod since 2016 and have even had comments promoted in the comment section yet remain pre moderated.
Most posts never make the page unless they are supportive of the article.
I block the guardian on my proxy so never see it unless I go out of my way to.
I don’t miss it.
Me neither.
Bit wet and maybe a bit sentimental, but I just find it so sad.
Generally, I try and write respectfully, factually and reasonably, but everything I’ve written more recently on CiF, which admittedly ain’t much as it ain’t worth going to the trouble, also seems to be ‘premoderated’ which, as we all know, is doublespeak for censored by some faceless apparatchik in order to rigidly conform to a specific narrative.
An acceptance of and open discussion of a mass of differing respectful opinions are, for me, the cornerstone of any robust democracy worth its salt so the once mighty Guardian’s position, particularly leading up to and most notably since Brexit as you allude to, speaks volumes to me and is all the more ‘ironic’ given its proclaimed political allegiances.
“I’d be much more interested in reading what he has to say about her treatment by her peers, and the newsroom culture he left behind”
Melanie Philips certainly had no doubts about the culture she left behind at the Guardian; the deeply partisan, anti Western, climate bothering excuse that it is.
Have a read of her great wee book Guardian Angel.
Alan Rubbisher turned the Guardian from a wonderful, respected and independent newspaper into a sewer of authoritarian, woke bigotry, an echo-chamber for the nastiest, stupidest people on the internet, and a propaganda sheet foe the Labour party.
He promoted people like the fantastically dimwitted Polly Toynbee, the schoolboy activist Owen Jones and the horrible bigot Zoe Williams.
Not to mention the fact that it lost vast amounts of money and readers every year he was in charge.
What’s the evidence that Zoe Williams is anti-Semitic?
I saw her on the telly justifying her Corbyntard friends who had been shouting anti-semitic abuse at old ladies by saying that they were “punching up”.
That sounds suspiciously like something that didn’t quite happen the way you’re describing it, I have to say. I’m happy to be proven wrong if you can provide substantiation by links/videos.
It happened on BBC TV and it really doesn’t matter whether you think it is suspicious or not.
I’m not saying it should matter to you; I’m pointing out that to me it doesn’t sound like an accurate portrayal of events at all. Did Zoe Williams herself say anything clearly anti-semitic on said BBC programme?
Unless you saw the programme, how you think it sounds is irrelevant.
If you are giving support & justification to people shouting anti-Semitic abuse, that means you agree with them – ergo you are an anti-Semite.
Just like Jeremy Corbyn supporting that artist who painted an anti-Semitic mural, or laying wreaths and doing his little Islamic prayer gesture at the grave of one of the Munich terrorists.
You don’t have to shout “I hate Jews” for it to be clear what you think.
“If you are giving support & justification to people…that means you agree with them”
That’s not true at all. If I thought you were being attacked unfairly I might support you; would that mean I agree with you? There’s such a thing as trying to be fair, trying to contextualise etc. even if it’s done in a muddleheaded way.
That said, I’ve tried and failed to find the BBC clip you’re talking about and you’re of course correct I should see it before saying any more, so I’ll bow out.
“Corbyntard”?
This gets worse.
Williams is labelled a horrible antisemite for supposedly supporting her friends, who support Corbyn. Who in turn, seems to have been tried and convicted for being across the street from a graveyard on the wrong day and criticising Israel.
I’m not a fan of Corbyn, but I don’t believe that he’s antisemitic. Netanyahu got the mud throwing started, the Chronicle picked it up, and the Labour party bailed on him rather than absorb any more collateral stink. There’s a lot of cowardice in this whole affair.
I have never been a fan of Corbyn (except possibly as a good Leader of the Opposition who might actually challenge the Govt) but I never saw anything that he, or most of his colleauges, did that was anti- semitic. Anti-Zionist definitely and that is one of the cleverest tricks a Govt (Israel in this case) has ever managed. When the seemingly International definition of anti-semitism includes:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g.,
by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Denying the fact, SCOPE (my emphasis, as far as I am aware the scope of the Holocaust is reliably uncertain), mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
https://www.holocaustrememb…
I would have thought that anti-zionism is clearly different to anti-semitism and this is made clear by the fact that there are many Jews who are, for a range of reasons, anti-zionist.
You might be right as I only started reading the Guardian at all during his tenure but that was because it was the only paper that seemed to really be fighting for citizens against an overmighty world establishment eg Snowden, Assange etc.
Now it is just a joke and as soon as the Guardian Weekly becomes as woke and ridiculous as the daily paper I shall have to bin that. And then where will I get my understanding of other, reasonable or tolerant, views?
The mass denunciation of Suzanne Moore by 338 of her newsroom coleagues provides an important indication of where mainstream journalism is headed. Have the MSM now reached a stage where the minions (using Woke morality as their frame of reference) are in control of output? This phenomenon is given insufficient attention. The focus is always on what “star” journalists have to say.
Actually I think the majority of the 338 were in other departments like IT, accounts and, (shudder), HR.
Like I said, the minions (not unlike the cartoon characters minus the humour).
Indeed. And they have the gall to write editorials complaining about “bullying”!
You should read what has happened to the New York Times recently.
They both deserve to die.
Yes, the NYT is another paper that I would buy when in NY, or read online. I don’t even look at it in the library these days where it is free to read.
Have the MSM now reached a stage where the minions (using Woke morality as their frame of reference) are in control of output?
Yes. The campus paper and its staff have graduated into the regular world.
Remember how we used to laugh at those over-sensitive Uni-snowflakes? Wait till they get out into the “real world” we said. That’ll soon straighten them out!
Little did we suspect that the real (adult) world would cave in so easily to their juvenile demands. That’s what happens when you leave the moral highground vacant for too long ““ squatters move in.
Very true. I also they would hit a brick wall when they left university but instead it was made of tissue paper.
I must have missed this one but always thought that Suzanne Moore was a poor columnist, in other words a typical Guardian columnist.
I stopped trying to offer contrary opinions on Guardian columns when it became apparent that “discussion” for the editors meant agreeing with the opinions of their columnists, or being censored. Any newspaper that censors opinions not conducive to their ideological fixation, while proudly proclaiming in their masthead their commitment to truth, is not worthy of my time as a reader.
I remember in particular an issue concerning Suzanne Moore who wrote a column berating editors of (other) newspapers for allowing so much hatred in their columns.
Then someone pointed out in a comment that Moore herself, just a few months previous, had written a column on why it is morally acceptable to hate men as a group.
In response, the Guardian removed the comment, as well as others which had merely posted a link to Moore’s own column. Very quickly, her entire column complaining about the hatred spewed by other publications was also removed.
To me this revealed the utter hypocrisy of the Guardian when it came to sexism, and their own cowardice regarding facing up to their own double standards. They now have only two strings to their bow: condescending lectures on woke topics, and a obsessive compulsive need to censor any ideas that run counter to their narrative.
Heavily censored, Ive had three accounts pre moderated then blocked for nothing more than holding a different political view to the majority, who seem to be free to hurl abuse with impunity.
Try and highlight the unfairness and pre mod will prevent anyone ever knowing.
Someone recently commented that all Brexiteers, like cowards, had run away and were no longer participating in discussions. In truth they’ve all had their accounts frozen.
Journalism has debased itself. It was well on the way to doing so before Covid, but since then has only proven its corruption. To mention only two recent examples: no major media outlets reported on the thousands of Danish people beating back a proposed new draconian vaccination law, or the Portuguese court case that declared the PCR tests unreliable and therefore an illegal basis for a lockdown. In the US, TV journalists actually cut off President Trump’s announcement of his legal team investigating election fraud in mid-sentence, the TV anchor stating: “This is just lies; we can’t let this go on. We won’t.” That is NOT journalism! That is partisan politics, pure and simple. And the result is not journalism but partisan propaganda.
Ms. Ditum succumbs to the unsubtle, all-or-nothing thinking all too prevalent these days: If you disagree with the mainstream left narrative, then you are a rabid right-wing nut job, nothing more, no shades or degrees. To automatically lump in dissenters from the Covid narrative as “conspiracy theorists” or “paranoiacs” is insulting, demeaning and just plain ignorant of reality.
He also believes in tax evasion when the Guardian does it.
I’ve the email on that one.
I have just been looking at today’s Times newspaper (the British London daily).
What collectively comes across to me from most of its pieces is that it is a journal for smug affluent people who do very little in the way of real thinking.
And you would be correct. One of the milestones in my long walk away from the MSM was reading the Times and Guardian etc in the library of my home town, circa 2002. (At the time I was living in Belsize Park and still buying the bloody Independent every day). I suddenly realised that not one article in the national papers was of any interest or relevance to anyone in my home town, and nor would anyone of the ‘smug affluent people’ to whom you refer be interested in any aspect of life in my home town, or any other small town. This is a small example of the attitude that led to Brexit.
Did you drink in the Steele’s or the Washington?
Well I once witnessed an entertaining bar fight at the Steele’s. It’s a long time ago and I tend to forget which pub was which, but I watched the football in a variety of local pubs. I tend to do my ‘drinking’ at serious wine tastings, preferably blind tastings.
Spot On.
Plans to charge? I d be more than willing to pay to keep unherd going
Kath Viner has trashed the Guardian and allowed appalling race baiting to be published in the opinion sections. Shame on her.
Goodness, what a detestable idea, that people not paid by the industry should be allowed to say anything.
I think the author is a little charitable towards “heavyweight” journalists. The term “muckraker”, when it was first coined, was not an insult. It was actually a compliment. It was accepted that there were stones which had to be looked under for the good of a healthy society, and the kind of people who would do that were not going to be “respectable” columnists. They were going to be the weirdos, the lowlifes and the bottom feeders.
Nothing has actually much changed in journalism in the hundred years since. If you want journalism, you need to go to the same type of people. Today, you’ll find them running channels on the internet, but the dynamic is the same. The higher up the food chain a journalist is, the less you can trust what he says.
The guardian online comments pages had their uses when sane people were logged in, but the dreadful programming flaws that led to entire threads and conversations being repeated made it unreadable. Only the Telegraph had a more unnavigable forum.
Slightly at a tangent, but the reference to Unherd going to the pay wall intrigued me. As there is no advertising, I have often wondered how it is sustainable.
Would i pay? I pay a couple of quid a week for everything in the Torygraph – so maybe if it was less than that! I might even subscribe to the Guardian if they went to paywall. What I find depressing is those constant pleas for charity…
‘What I find depressing is those constant pleas for charity…’
To be fair that’s probably as close to a vaguely socialist ideal that the Guardian gets nowadays ie anyone can still access it, you pay what you can afford and if that’s nothing you at least you can still access it the same as everyone else.
The people who need guides on how to use journalism are unlikely to be buying books at all.
Like those who call themselves journalists? The profession has done itself no favors in recent years and that is reflected by the public’s lack of trust in the information that is presented. It may be satisfying to take a shot at one outlet, but that’s thin cover for the others who are doing anything but yeoman’s work.
Comments that reflect badly on the Guardian itself are simply ‘disappeared’ within a few seconds of posting, like they never existed. Things not to do: repost Guardian articles from 1974, in which their Science Correspondent warned about the “worldwide and rapid trend towards a mini Ice Age”, based in part on the “much faster than expected decline in global temperatures”. Especially avoid quoting “the new Ice Age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind”. Also, don’t mention the column where Owen Jones, while no doubt stopping at one of his colleagues’ second home in the Dordogne, was shocked to discover that the French old age pension is ‘only’ 1,000 Euros a month.
Rusbridger gave my friend Russell Jackson a shot at open journalism. Rusty seemed to be doing well at The Graun, but not too long after went into sports book publishing. He was on the point of giving the word game up when he was invited to do long form articles at the ABC where he just won a Walkley award for one of his pieces.
I wonder whether journalists get their noses out of joint when people without journalism backgrounds make a splash. Certainly, when blogging started, journalists loved to take shots at bloggers, but now newspapers have become big blogs.
Comment on the Guardian articles has become pretty limited to the safe and non controversial lately. Whenever the journalist goes off on one of their sermons, which is a lot of them, they don’t allow comment. And when it becomes apparent that the comments on an article are not quite what they expected or wanted they get turned off pretty quick. The moderation of comments also appears to depend to what extent it challenges the concept of the writer.
“Perhaps, ungenerously, this vagueness is because Rusbridger no longer has the answers.”
Quite funny – as Rusbridger never did.
The endlessly ridiculous and accidentally self-satirizing Grauniad is an onanistic circle of extreme opinion masquerading, as at a university fancy dress party, as “analysis.” It is now only of worth as a bizarre scale-marker that is worth a glance when you want the leftists’ version of Breitbart.
Poor article. Much of british journalism is poor and predominantly left leaning woke, guardian and bbc particular examples of very strong bias. The bbc should go the way of other journalism and be self funding maybe when you are all replaced by bots we might again have some balance.
I’ll see your open journalism and raise you a Carole Cadwalladr.
Or Carole Codswalloper, as we call her in my house.
All newspapers’ business models boil down to peddling fear based rage clickbait. This is an artefact of the fragmentation and diminution of the market for journalism. Once you get that their news agenda is much easier to parse.
As for CiF, it was a brave experiment that failed as the Guardian’s herd of sacred cows has grown so large and acceptable opinion has narrowed so much. I suspect, but don’t know, that some readers have taken on themselves to be park-keeper and keep errant opinion ‘orf the grass’, and moderators accept their complaints uncritically.
Guardian
-news reporting leans left but is goo
-investigative journalism is excellent
-opinion/editorial pieces way too left (Marina Hyde is very funny); but some opinionators are middle of the road
-sport coverage is great as long as woke doesn’t come through
For once we agree on something – the Guardian’s football coverage is indeed very good. Even so, I still can’t bring myself to go to the site and read it. And I can access Sid Lowe on ESPN on YouTube.
Given your laudable attempt at rapprochement, who’s going to finally break this bitter impasse and upvote the other?
Cue Eastenders’ outro…..
I wouldn’t insult my poop by wiping my back side with the Guardian. Maybe though as a second thought a page with a pic of Lady Owen Jones or that other vile woman P. Tonybee perhaps.
What used to really twist my melon were the occasional, casually dropped references from some of the ‘anywhere’ columnists, Polly Toynbee being my biggest bugbear, although she was by no means alone, of regular visits to Tuscan and Southern French second homes one week, only to be followed by some self-righteous cr@p about climate change the next (obviously the result of someone else’s life choices other than those of their goodselves) regularly railing against one my own biggest personal bug bears, Buy-to-Let, without the merest hint of a blush, or some hand wringing, patronising anti-Brexit rant feigning empathy for the ignorant, by implication dumb, downtrodden self-harming, unwashed ‘somewhere’ masses who were simply all hoodwinked into voting to leave the EU by a wicked, right-wing, populist press in cahoots with a self-seeking political elite.
Frankly, Guardian columnists turned rank hypocrisy into an art form under Rusbridger and by all accounts very little has changed since.
Would you call Dr Mike Yeadon’s contribution a conspiracy theory? YouTube certainly seems to, and censored his piece, which you now have to get via the AIER.
I think the gruaniad has become increasingly shrill and increasingly promotes an identitarian left view of the world. Implicit are major intellectual failings, such as the assumption that a difference in outcome between groups is caused by discrimination. It’s a dreary and exhausting proces pointing this sort of stuff out – so I barely read the gruaniad these days. Having said thiat, it still has Kenan Malik, who is a stauch defender of free speech, so not all bad.
Says Sarah Ditum: “How does the naïve reader clock that a crank website like Exaro (now-defunct promotor of false sexual abuse claims) is worth less than heavyweight investigative journalism that is equally free to read?”
Excuse me. On a point of information: where, nowadays – in the mainstream national media – IS heavyweight investigative journalism to be found, whether free or for money?
For an instance of what I mean: in the western world we have had 13 years to date (and still counting) of Barack Obama, as senator, presidential candidate and then president treated by all the main newspaper titles in the USA and most in the UK as a godlike saint, and subjected only to sycophancy, adoration and questions posed in postures and rhetoric of humble devotion. Likewise among the broadcasters. No hard enquiries, no actual coverage of what his policies were, their logic, their intrinsic character, their outcomes.
Since 2015 we have had a 24/7 shriek-in against Donald Trump, with none of his policies examined on their own merits, no thinking outside the box of the media Group Obsession; and this, all characteristically, in an Occidental journalism which has largely abandoned independence, ethics, professionalism, and which does all the time the very opposite of what it most boasts and claims of itself – talking truth to power.
If you studied (as I did) the coverage of the 2015-16 election chiefly in America at the time but also over here to a considerable extent, you would have been (as I was) very hard put to it to find a qualitative difference between that and the conduct of Tass, Izvestia and Pravda in the Soviet Union or Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda in Nazi Germany.
On balance I think the Goebbels ministry was a bit fairer to Winston Churchill than most of the Occidental media have been to Donald Trump (a man I am not myself wholly in favour of).
The Berlin line on Churchill 1940-45 was that he was guilty of three crimes in ascending order of depravity: (1) drunkenness, (2) bombing – without any provocation! – cities full of innocent women and children, (3) being a friend of the Jews.
Donald Trump has been treated by nearly all the U.S. media and very much of ours as if he were Hitler’s worse elder brother or Satan’s own plenipotentiary vicegerent on Earth.
So it is also with all manner of other issues and concerns. Today’s media-folk, joined at the hip with the Political Class, surpass themselves as shills for the current Ruling Caste in the western democracies.
I wait, with bated breath, to learn from you where I can find ‘heavyweight investigative journalism’ among the print titles we used to call ‘the broadsheets’ or among today’s mainstream broadcasters.
There obviously is a problem with offensive comments; ‘death and rape threats’. It must be awful to read them. But writers should rationalise that as only 0.0037% of Guardian readers even post, it’s probably a very small percentage of that very small percentage that post nasty attacks. So a handful of cranks abuse in this way. Not easy to take when you’re on the receiving end no doubt, but a problem caused by a minuscule minority exaggerated by magnitudes.
Says Sarah Ditum: “How does the naïve reader clock that a crank website like Exaro (now-defunct promotor of false sexual abuse claims) is worth less than heavyweight investigative
journalism that is equally free to read?”
Excuse me. On a point of information: where, nowadays – in the mainstream national media – IS heavyweight investigative journalism to be found, whether free or for money?
For an instance of what I mean: in the western world we have had 13 years to date (and still counting) of Barack Obama, as senator, presidential candidate and then president treated by all the main newspaper titles in the USA and most in the UK as a godlike saint, and subjected only to sycophancy, adoration and questions posed in postures and rhetoric of humble devotion. Likewise among the broadcasters. No hard enquiries, no actual coverage of what his policies were, their logic, their intrinsic character, their outcomes.
Since 2015 we have had a 24/7 shriek-in against Donald Trump, with none of his policies examined on their own merits, no thinking outside the box of the media Group Obsession; and this, all characteristically, in an Occidental journalism which has largely abandoned independence, ethics, professionalism, and which does all the time the very opposite of what it most boasts and claims of itself – talking truth to power.
If you studied (as I did) the coverage of the 2015-16 election chiefly in America at the time but also over here to a considerable extent, you would have been (as I was) very hard put
to it to find a qualitative difference between that and the conduct of Tass, Izvestia and Pravda in the Soviet Union or Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda in Nazi Germany.
On balance I think the Goebbels ministry was a bit fairer to Winston Churchill than most of the Occidental media have been to Donald Trump (a man I am not myself wholly in favour of).
The Berlin line on Churchill 1940-45 was that he was guilty of three crimes in ascending order of depravity: (1) drunkenness, (2) bombing – without any provocation! – cities full of
innocent women and children, (3) being a friend of the Jews.
Donald Trump has been treated by nearly all the U.S. media and very much of ours as if he were Hitler’s worse elder brother or Satan’s own plenipotentiary vicegerent on Earth.
So it is also with all manner of other issues and concerns. Today’s media-folk, joined at the hip with the Political Class, surpass themselves as shills for the current Ruling Caste in
the western democracies.
I wait, with bated breath, to learn from you where I can find ‘heavyweight investigative journalism’ among the print titles we used to call ‘the broadsheets’ or among today’s mainstream broadcasters.
The Guardian does not bother to separate comment from news. Other mainstream newspapers do this to a lesser extent, but at the Guardian it is blatant. Opinion runs through every article.
The newspapers have often been too slow to realise what the digitisation of content (and the unbiquity of content creation that enabled) meant for their business models.
The major issue is the disintermediation effect that separated ad spend from the control of newspapers and broadcasters.
Much news became independent of the legacy journalism cpompanies and in the evolving market they had to stop covering it. Most newspapers now exist digitally,and most recycle news already broken via the social media platforms.
This leaves comment as an arena to try and drive eyeball capture, and the number of clicks on whatever social media platform used to distribute it as the key metric…which encourages both silo thinking, to keep like minded people clicking and ‘liking’ , and very adversarial, controversial, confrontational thinking, to get *angry* clicks and WTF shares.
The present worries around degraded standards of public discourse are at least as much the fault of professional news operations desperately seeking clicks, as the slightly, crackers, ranty people spending 16 hours out of every 24, trying to create their own one person *brands* in the spare bedroom.