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A quick review of UK print media 1) The Times - Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece. Employs MP Michael Gove for £100k a year after he was sacked for being a backstabber
by jimnotgym 9y ago
A quick review of UK print media
1) The Times - Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece. Employs MP Michael Gove for £100k a year after he was sacked for being a backstabber.
2) The Mail - "The EU and immigrants want to kill your children and sleep with your sister and may even affect your house price". Billionaire owner too.
3) The Telegraph - "The Torygraph" former paper of the ruling classes, now mouth piece of two weird billionaire brothers who live in a castle on an island like particularly boring bond villains.
4) The Express - "Princes Diana wanted Brexit". Owned by billionaire Richard "not a pornographer" Desmond
5) The Sun - Rupert Murdoch's gutter mouthpiece
6) The News of the World - Rupert's other paper that had to close because they hacked the voice mail of a girl who was murdered, and therefore delayed the police investigation.
7) The Mirror - low grade leftism, but mostly celeb gossip
8) The Financial Times - Pretty good journalism and then pages of bond prices etc
9) The Independent. No longer in print. Billionaire Arab and Russian owners
edit: from comments there is a number 10
10) The i - a lower case Independent. Thinner, cheaper and still in print. This main use for the i seems to be to leave it on train seats when the Metro (a free paper they give out in railway stations) is just too cheap. The journalism seems OK. Owned by establishment media PLC
So if you didn't want Brexit, think immigration is helping demographics, think Princess Di should be laid to rest now and don't think the world is full of benefit scroungers, there is only the Guardian left.
edit: formatting and a sad inability to list numbers
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nicky0 9y agoYou missed the i.
- jraines 9y agoWell, if we're doing quick parody headlines as stand-ins, it's actually impossible to out-Guardian the Guardian: "I dread the day my daughter's poos get smaller" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/dread-daughter-poos-smaller-girl-conform https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/dread-... "Tea is a national disgrace" "Robots are racist and sexist, just like the people who created them" In any case, good on them for proving out this revenue model, hopefully it's sustainable and we see gigantic yellow-orange beg-boxes on more online media (seriously)
- jririri82838 9y agoCherry picking from the “opinion” section is hardly a representation of “Guardian as a whole relative to Murdoch’s 3 mouthpieces as a whole” I’d rather the business model of the web be “beg boxes” out in the open versus “opt-in to data collection or stay offline”
- arthur_pryor 9y ago> "Robots are racist and sexist, just like the people who created them" to quote the simpsons, "it's funny because it's true." (still, funny comment, i upvoted, fwiw)
- tomarr 9y agoI do normally love to hate on the Guardian, but that is from their 'comment is free' opinion section, rather than the main news site. BBC and many others have these, which are basically just magazine format and of little journalistic value (although to be fair they do not claim to be).
- MarkMc 9y agoMy favourite: "How ancient lentils reveal the origins of social inequality" https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/11/lentils-origins-of-social-inequality https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/11/lentils-orig...
- a_bonobo 9y agoBut that one comes from the researchers themselves: >The weakening of a strong communal ideology surrounding food production and storage increased the potential for dominant families to emerge, either through consistently greater success, or through force or unequal conditions of exchange. This in turn created the preconditions of specialisation and social inequality upon which urban life was founded in Mesopotamia. (and that conjecture was based on lentils found by archaeologists)
- Brakenshire 9y agoThe Telegraph's political editor resigned because (he claims) the paper spiked stories about HSBC, after they threatened to pull advertising. So there's that as well. Alongside Murdoch's control of the Times, it's a pity there isn't a more decent centre-right paper.
- twic 9y agoAs a literally card-carrying socialist, i'd pick the Financial Times over the Guardian. They write about stuff that is actually important, in what seems like an intelligent and even-handed way. And the pages of bond prices are good for standing your muddy boots on. I grew up in a Guardian-reading household, and i want to like it, but it's too full of self-absorbed middle-class metropolitan smugness. And i'm a smug self-absorbed middle-class metropolitan, so i should know.
- chickenfries 9y agoAs an American of similar political leanings, I feel the same way about NYTimes households. I also find myself reading FT, WSJ and Bloomberg for more "important" stories as well.
- jimnotgym 9y agoI don't think the Guardian is all good, but since it is free you can skip the bits you don't like. I read a mix of the Guardian, WSJ, NYT, Economist, generally any quality paper that lets you freeload a bit. I am just a dabbler by nature. I used to get the Economist, but when I found the pile of copies still in their cellophane by my chair had grown to 12 I canceled it. I still buy it now and then. I like the New European too. It's real echo chamber, but the way some people seem to get annoyed just by it existing is worth the cover price. In fact a great sport is to go into WH Smith on a Friday and put it in front of the Daily Hate Mail and stand back watch the grumpy old men grimace as they have to touch it to move it out of the way. Classic. As an aside another sport which is not nearly popular enough is to pick up the pile of Daily Heil's at the supermarket and to place them in the toilet paper aisle. This actually caught on for a while. some people enjoy pushing pro EU leaflets inside them with the junk mail....
- louthy 9y agoAlthough not a newspaper, I find the Economist to have similar traits to your list for the FT. They'll also go properly in depth with many stories (multiple pages)
- 9y ago
- ygaf 9y ago>because they hacked the voice mail of a girl who was murdered, and therefore delayed the police investigation. This sounds like a fabricated implication. Lots of people (famous ones) were hacked, and I can't find a sign that delaying a police investigation caused the NOTW to nosedive.
- jimnotgym 9y agoI'm sorry, but rigorous logical argument seemed out of place in any discussion of the NOTW. I thought condensing their sad sad criminal behavior into one sound bite was absolutely in keeping with their style. Wikipedia has a primer on the News of the world, Milly Dowler and Andy Coulson. I suspect a formal discussion over why the paper actually closed (popularly to save the criminal investigation from going upwards to the owners) could fill a very sad book.
- hkmurakami 9y agoFT is now owned by Nikkei fwiw.
- drdrey 9y agoI would love to see a similar review of US media (print or digital). Where is the good stuff?
- sandov 9y ago>So if you didn't want Brexit, think immigration is helping demographics, think Princess Di should be laid to rest now and don't think the world is full of benefit scroungers, there is only the Guardian left. So, we should only read newspapers that agree with our world view?
- jimnotgym 9y agoI only read articles that 1) are not peddaling hate and devision 2) are not celeb gossip 3) interest me I would be suprised if that made me more idealistic than the majority of HN crowd?
- justincormack 9y agoDoes the FT actually still print the share prices? I guess maybe the older demographic likes that. The majority of their subscribers are online now so I guess never notice. Their online only content makes the print edition much worse.
- AndrewOMartin 9y agoYou sound like an ideal Private Eye subscriber. Current affairs, investigative journalism, literary criticism, Commentatorballs, [That's enough. Ed] Edited by the great, and clean, Ian Hislop.