6 ms·
The UK and world news writing in the Guardian is world class, but its social commentary and feature sections are rather left-leaning/progressive (or whatever wo
by Wintamute 11y ago
The UK and world news writing in the Guardian is world class, but its social commentary and feature sections are rather left-leaning/progressive (or whatever words we use these days), to put it mildly. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that their output is pretty politically polarised. They have a target audience that enjoy their politics, and indeed that's who they sell to.
But of course people from other political camps are obviously going to be clickbaited and take issue from time to time, so comments on divisive articles are going to get heated and fraught.
If the Guardian ran news and commentary that took ideas from the left and the right of the political divide based on merit rather than bias they might find things simmer down.
The way the paper is describing the current situation is that they only print virtuously correct articles, and then get mobbed by angry trolls. I look at it slightly differently ... they publish heavily politically biased articles that appeal to their readership, and in doing so troll differently politically minded folk. They reap what they sow, and either way they get clicks and sell ads. Fretting about online harassment is all part of the performance.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago>> "If the Guardian ran news and commentary that took ideas from the left and the right of the political divide based on merit rather than bias they might find things simmer down." I think it would just get worse. Currently you have liberal articles that conservative trolls attack in the comments. Balance that with conservative leaning articles and now the liberals have a comment section to troll in. The solution in my opinion is to do away with the comments. I have never seen anything useful in the comments on The Guardian and I read it quite often.
- Wintamute 11y agoI don't know that it would, I have more faith in humanity than that. If the ideas the Guardian championed were blind to overt politicisation and consistently based on objective merit, rather than ideology I think the strength of those ideas would be plain for people to see.
- striking 11y agoI find the coincidence of complaining about a comment section on the internet in a comment section on the internet delicious.
- widdershins 11y agoI understand your point, but if offering opinions from one political camp is viewed as 'trolling' by the others, then I would say we need to fix our approach to discourse.
- Wintamute 11y agoFrom my point of view, if the articles are consistently always going to have the same sort of political bias, then a subset of those articles are going to have taken an unreasonable position - and it's those unreasonable articles that will troll people all the more. Unless, that is, the specific political bias chosen results in many more objectively reasonable and correct articles, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet with modern small-L liberalism. At least some of the "fixing of discourse" has to come from the media outlets themselves. They can't continue to pit political camps against each other by outputting biased content, and then just point the finger at whichever political side they're unaligned with.
- forgingahead 11y agoThe way the paper is describing the current situation is that they only print virtuously correct articles, and then get mobbed by angry trolls. This is unfortunately exactly their thought process though -- if you are not "progressive" like they are in their values, you are a caveman and need to be enlightened. Such values are deemed the correct ones to have ("because it's CURRENT_YEAR") so of course anyone with a differing opinion is not just wrong, but morally bankrupt. This is also the general thought process of the New Radical Left, personified by the college students and sniffy intellectuals that do populate most of mainstream journalism and educational institutions. Reporting is no longer enough, one has to be an "agent of change". The Guardian staff are just butt-hurt that people have woken up to their proselytizing and won't let them get away with being an authority when they are desperately biased in their articles.
- norea-armozel 11y agoAnd yet no one cries foul when right leaning papers post articles suggesting LGBT people are mentally incompetent or morally depraved barbarians that'll eat your babies for breakfast. It just seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously by folks on the opposite end of the political spectrum then the right needs to do itself a favor: stop vilifying LGBT and other minorities categorically. It's not that hard, really.
- boyce 11y agoYou have to look at it in the context of the UK broadsheet market though. On the right, the Times (usually) and the Telegraph and if you'd consider it a broadsheet, the Daily Mail too. The Guardian is the only consistently left-leaning quality paper at least in England and I don't blame them for sticking to their guns.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoThe Guardian is bourgeois establishment, not left-leaning. It's been consistently hostile to genuine left-leaning views for at least a decade - probably longer. Its editorial policy reliably paints anyone to the left of Tony Blair as a lunatic extremist. Unfortunately this includes most paid-up members of the Labour party, whose perfectly legitimate views it reliably tries to marginalise. And it runs campaigns like this one, which seems to be part of an attempt to conflate honest debate and criticism with the worst excesses of abusive online trolling. It's true it's marginally to the left of the printed mainstream, but that only shows how far the Overton Window has been pushed away from moderate centrism in British politics.
- jamespo 11y agoIt's not just people being clickbaited, some of their most prolific commenters obviously disagree with their entire output and go in to stir the pot.