Though we’ve already posted on the Guardian’s severe financial crisis, Tom Wilson, who blogs at Tom Friedmann, posted his own piece on the issue and, when it comes to promoting the Guardian’s misfortunes, I simply don’t think its possible to overdo it.
It’s not uncommon to find opinion pieces in The Guardian praising Engels or prattling on about Marx yet the market forces that many at this publication decry seem to be about to do away with their jobs. Next month The Guardian is anticipated to announce significant job losses after experiencing yet another annual loss, this time of £35 Million. Clearly the public just dosen’t want to read the newspaper’s ultra-liberal and anti-western rhetoric day in day out quite as badly as its editors had anticipated. Indeed from those who have observed rain sodden teenagers handing out free copies of The Guardian outside of Kings Cross it would seem they can’t even give it away now. This all comes as a reminder that despite the huge amount of reverence that the Guardian seems to receive in certain circles it really only represents the view point of a tiny out of touch minority. All the more worrying then is that so many former employees of the BBC have commented on the extent to which BBC bosses allow their position to be informed by The Guardian which we are told has long been the paper of choice down at the Beeb.
Time and time again the Guardian has sort out and served up the most radical writers to give most counterintuitive and fringe line available. On just about every issue you can take the mainstream opinion, spin it a hundred degrees to the Left and you will end up at the Guardian’s position on the subject. On any given day you can tune into the Guardian’s Comment is Free page webpage and get a taste of what life would be like if we all lived on planet Chomsky. From trashing the Royal Wedding and insulting Britain’s war dead to branding international human rights activists Imperialists and peddling the worst anti-Semitic slurs against Israel and its supporters. The Guardian has made its bed in an anarchist squat and now in an LSD fuelled haze it can lie in it (it recently published an article in defence of the darling of the Hallucinogen addicts; Timothy Leary).
In an attempt to white wash this abysmal turn of events Guardian spokespeople have claimed that the paper will be moving some of its focus to online reporting targeting the American market, no doubt in an attempt to bring the system down from within. And so it would seem that all that leaves for us to do is to wish our American friends good luck and sit back and watch The Guardian slowly collapse in on itself like a small failing Communist country.
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16 comments
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June 22, 2011 at 7:18 am
AKUS
Pardon me for repeating myself:
With all the bragging about the number of people who read their blogs for free, the circulation of the paper itself is pitiful beyond belief:
The Washington Post, which basically serves the Washington DC Metro area, with a population of about 4 million, has daily circulation of 562,000 and 780,000 on Sunday. The Guardian is supposedly a national paper in a country of some 60 million people!!
They also need to cut back reporting on Israel:
Roughly 629 journalists, by my estimate, are dedicated to reporting negative news from Israel, and about 800 other staff are used to moderate the I/P threads.
Just stopping the reportage about Israel could save the paper. If they started reporting the truth about Israel the number of liberal, socially-minded left-wing Jewish readers would eclipse their current readership.
For example, Alan, they like to read the truth about world events, not the humpty-dumpty imaginary world of people like Seamus Milne and Harriet Sherwood and the editors (you?).
I call for a boycott of “Auto Trader”.
June 22, 2011 at 7:50 am
Natalie Wood
Quite soon there will be no-one north or south of any border sipping their Shabbat Scotch schnapps while reading ‘Auto Trader’ (LOL)!
Part of the trouble with The Guardian, The Independent and others of their ilk, is that if, when and oh so very rarely we’re able escape their manic politics we’re treated to very fine writing indeed.
It would make life a lot easier for pro-Israel people like us if they didn’t exist but – au fond – the world would be far poorer without them.
June 22, 2011 at 8:01 am
Shimon
Law of unintended consequences? What if The Guardian’s plan to shift more on-line etc works? Maybe necessity will push it into leap-frogging News Ltd into developing paid-for content with long-term benefits? And what about all those ideologues, I mean journalists, who’ll be forced to leave The Guardian. They’ll find jobs elsewhere. The BBC? ITN? Sky? AFP? Reuters? AP? The bias and distortion will live on but like a cloud of gnats rather than a mad dog. And it’s a lot easier to see a mad dog.
June 23, 2011 at 4:05 am
FoolMeOnce
Nicely put. I like “planet Chomsky” too. The Guardian (of what?) have lost their final speck of integrity long ago, dissolved into a niche-market VIEWSpaper adhering to the lowest form of Contrarianism- taking the automatic contrary view on popular opinion for the sake of sticking out and looking sophisticated.
They have overstated their cynical and skewed view on everything that is decent while remaining too silent on the most important things. (Where were these big heroes BEFORE the Arab spring? Right, in Israel.)
Printing press is dyeing. Some are dyeing, mercifully, faster than others.
June 23, 2011 at 4:07 am
FoolMeOnce
dyeing / dying. Woops.
June 22, 2011 at 7:31 am
pretzelberg
What’s so bad about defending Timothy Leary?
June 22, 2011 at 8:04 am
Derek Pasquill
Good riddance to bad rubbish
June 22, 2011 at 8:15 am
dominic
To me England is not going to miss this paper, I wish the BBC, the Sun and any anti christian/ Israel media outlet. Bad newspapers could be used as good fish and chip newspaper wrappers aslong as noone reads it
June 22, 2011 at 8:24 am
conchovor
The Guardian will keep on going. It’s too popular with an international readership. Anyway. many papers are run as lossleaders. TG’s money is in advertising. It’s capital is tied up in property.
June 22, 2011 at 9:25 am
Katya Segura
I consider myself “left wing”. In fact, many would say that my political views verge on being “extremely” leftist. I believe in the essential, inherent equality and worth of every single *individual* human being on this planet. I would like to see an economic system, as well as a social system, that is inescapably and fundamentally based on this principle.
The Guardian, however, and indeed the modern (or should that be post-modern) “left” in general seem to me completely divorced from everything I stand for and everything I hold dear. The individual barely seems to matter. The “group” is everything. Identity politics, with its communitarian mentality, seems to rule uncritiqued, despite the overwhelmingly anti-progressive and anti-human ramifications of such a world-view. Cultural relativism is accepted almost axiomatically, despite its philosophical and ethical bankruptcy, hypocrisy and grossly racist undertones. Young angry guys who hate gays, women, jews and hindus are treated with condescending sympathy and a phoney patina of comradeship, while little girls’ right to grow up with their clitorises unmolested is apparently an inconvenient distraction of interest only to the “imperialistic” right, with their sickening sense of Manifest Destiny.
What in the name of all that’s holy is going on? Did I miss a memo? When did wife-beating, religious coercion, clitoridectomy, hanging gays from cranes, destroying priceless archeological treasures, blowing up school buses, throwing acid in the faces of literate women, launching rockets at kindergartens and eagerly disseminating translations of “Mein Kampf” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” become “left wing”? They aren’t. They are monstrous, oppressive abominations. They are part and parcel of a totalitarian world-view that seeks to concentrate both temporal and spiritual power in the hands of a very few and impose physical, economic, cultural, intellectual, spiritual and emotional serfdom on 6 billion people.
It’s batshit crazy and I, for one, won’t stand for it.
June 22, 2011 at 10:38 am
Serendipity
Katya, well written and I have no doubt that there are many more like you, who are thinkers rather than sheeple.
You are right that the being-in-the-world of the post-modern, lunatic Left IS crazy and a moral inversion in itself
I hear you when you say that you won’t stand for it.
But what can you, and we, actually DO about it?
June 23, 2011 at 3:05 am
cba
Katya, I feel exactly as you do. Your penultimate paragraph (“What in the name of all that’s holy… “) could have been pulled directly from my own head. I really ope Serendipity is correct and that there are many more like you.
June 23, 2011 at 3:33 pm
SerJew
Nicely written. However, you are still under the spell of lunatic leftism. For instance, when you write
“I believe in the essential, inherent equality and worth of every single *individual* human being on this planet. ”
This is sentimental romanticized non-sense. Not every single indiviaudl human being in this planet has the same worth. Some people are criminals, some are perverts, some are pedophiles, some are torturers, some are mass-murderers, etc. These people, for their deeds, *MUST* be treated differently and punished.
The traditional left-wing response to the prevalence of evil in human history is to say humans are essentially good and society is the corrupting influence, which is pure rubbish. It lead s to the massive transfer of responsibility from the individual to his circunstances, which is a real source of moral corruption with quite real consequences. It also leads to the notion that “education” and/or “therapy” is the magic (utopian) final solutions, which already led to untold dystopian disasters.
It´s better to face realities, recognize that humans are neither essentially good nor essentially evil, but essentially ambiguous. And recognize that evil will never be completely erradicated, that we can only try to prevent it and control its damage as much as possible. with all kinds of different measures, surely including education (not indoctrination) but moral responsibility, accountability and punishment.
June 22, 2011 at 10:17 am
Andy Gill
Guardian losing tens of millions? It doesn’t say much for the competence of Alan Rusbridger (salary £500,000) does it? Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.
June 22, 2011 at 5:23 pm
Rural
The Big Issue (TBI) has declined Guradian’s offer of a merger on the grounds that it finds Guardian too radical for its readership and that it fears the merger will weaken TBI’s financial position not to mention the negetive goodwill it will be lumbered with in the process.
An insider has revealed that some “names” from the Guardian have also been declined a job at Press TV on the grounds that any association with Guardian hacks would tarnish Press TV’s impeccable reputation of neutrality on the whole I/P issue and views Guardian as too anti-”Israeli” for its liking.
June 23, 2011 at 3:47 pm
cityca
“Will The Guardian soon be swept away by its own unpopular radicalism?”
Maybe, maybe not, but it’s a nice thought. I can’t see the vile red/green anti-Israel alliance PAYING to post their views on CiF. They are not merely mean spirited but mean as well I suspect.
If, as could happen, the silent majority of this country finally get fed up with the human rights, politically correct, multicultural madness we have endured for decades and there is a backlash, the Guardian may again come into its own as the voice of the oppressed minority. If that happens, I imagine it’s focus may shift from Israel, back to the right.