by chunkyslink on 5/7/21, 10:08 AM with 80 comments
by dazc on 5/7/21, 10:28 AM
by sega_sai on 5/7/21, 12:27 PM
by gizmo on 5/7/21, 11:00 AM
The problem isn't just that the Guardian gets major stuff wrong, and that they don't -- as a matter of course -- acknowledge mistakes. The big, no huge, problem is that they do almost no real journalism whatsoever.
(I can also pick nits about this article that getting global cooling wrong and asbestos doesn't mean anything because those were mundane mistakes that are not indicative of a larger problem, but I'd rather focus on the big picture that The Guardian doesn't do real journalism and the big things they get wrong as a consequence they never acknowledge, not even in articles like these.)
edit: bonus link about how the Guardian silences and fires journalists who tweet sarcastically about sensitive topics. Thread: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359544245238005760
by tsegratis on 5/7/21, 10:32 AM
I imagine few would be as honest as this
by slx26 on 5/7/21, 11:52 AM
by vinsci on 5/7/21, 11:11 AM
wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html
by sirsinsalot on 5/7/21, 10:47 AM
by fenderbluesjr on 5/7/21, 12:08 PM
by commandlinefan on 5/7/21, 1:51 PM
Ironic, considering the apologetic tone of the article overall...
by thinkingemote on 5/7/21, 12:26 PM
Personally I think the Guardian deserves support as the only real opposition or left newspaper in the UK. It's really flawed and the lies are harder to see but it fulfils an essential role in society.
by bioinformatics on 5/7/21, 12:50 PM
by yosito on 5/7/21, 10:13 AM
by nailer on 5/7/21, 11:20 AM
by fallingfrog on 5/7/21, 12:37 PM
If the same pattern holds, then radical leftist positions of today will be again the mainstream positions in the future.
The lag time has been considerable though. I think even into the 90’s the guardian would not have approved of the suffragette’s direct action methods.
In some ways though things have stagnated for almost a century; Bernie Sanders public health care plan is something that was being pushed for a century ago, and the forces of private capital have managed to hold back the tide for a hundred years.
So it might be that my prediction that the radical left of today is the mainstream of tomorrow is totally wrong, and things could actually regress.
by thu2111 on 5/7/21, 11:16 AM
One of the first examples is a little odd.
errors of scientific understanding resulted in a 1927 article that promoted the virtues of asbestos
It's a bit unclear what "errors of scientific understanding" means here, but in context this makes it sound like the Guardian writers mis-understood scientists who were warning about the dangers of asbestos. The report presented to Parliament about the dangers of asbestos didn't arrive until 1930 and before that there was only a single known case of asbestosis in the UK, so that seems to deflect attention from the fact that the errors - if you want to call a lack of knowledge an error - were by scientists, not the Guardian writers.
Towards the end we have this:
"Since then, referendums have become, much to the paper’s displeasure, an established part of our constitution, used as a way to stamp democratic legitimacy on to controversial ideas and as a tool of party management"
Perhaps one day they'll be writing a similar backwards-looking piece apologizing for having held this view too. At the start they rail against the paper's former imperialism and feelings of superiority, then claim that referendums are a problem because they legitimize "controversial ideas". This from a paper which delights in publishing controversial and extreme ideas:
https://twitter.com/somuchguardian?lang=en
A few select headlines:
"The tears of joy emoji is the worst of all - it's used to gloat about human suffering"
"Brexit will spell the end of British art as we know it"
"Can male writers avoid misogyny?"
"What if we're living in a computer simulation?"
"Robots are racist and sexist"
etc. Perhaps some of these will make future lists.