6 ms·

Agreed. I think their level of investigation is peerless. They go where others fear to tread. They ruffle more feathers in every single edition than the FT does

Agreed. I think their level of investigation is peerless. They go where others fear to tread. They ruffle more feathers in every single edition than the FT does in a year. I can't think of any other UK publication that comes close.

tialaramex 6y ago
It's an overall excellent and very dense UK-specific read (~40 pages of editorial, cartoons and letters every fortnight). Several stories broken by Private Eye have ended up featuring on Hacker News much later too such as Horizon - an IT system for the UK's Post Office which somehow executives managed to persuade the courts was infallible, so if a bug in Horizon said your Post Office ought to have £10k of cash that it didn't you (the "Postmaster" of that office, typically a small local store owner making a little bit of extra money offering this vital service) might literally go to prison for stealing this money that never even existed. It does have its own unique culture you'd need to spin up on to really grok what's going on. For example it just calls the Queen "Brenda", and various government agencies get more apposite names like the "Fundamentally Supine Agency". And there are a lot of running jokes after existing for so long.
- amiga_500 6y ago
  It's basically what the press looks like when they are doing their job. They are privately owned and on a mission to tell the truth, not to make as much money as possible. Hislop and before him Cook are actual real people trying to do something good instead of just attempting to get rich for the sake of it before dropping dead. There are lots of in jokes and also "code phrases", such as "tired and emotional" == drunk, more here [1]. I used to subscribe to it but cancelled it after I left the UK. The UK press are an absolute disaster. Most are partisan, including: Telegraph: torygraph Daily mail: torygraph FT: bankers times Guardian: with you until you need actual help then it's back to mi5 Sun/Times: Murdoch incorporated Private eye is literally carry everything on their shoulders. There is nothing else. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_in_Private_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_...

tialaramex 6y ago

It's an overall excellent and very dense UK-specific read (~40 pages of editorial, cartoons and letters every fortnight). Several stories broken by Private Eye have ended up featuring on Hacker News much later too such as Horizon - an IT system for the UK's Post Office which somehow executives managed to persuade the courts was infallible, so if a bug in Horizon said your Post Office ought to have £10k of cash that it didn't you (the "Postmaster" of that office, typically a small local store owner making a little bit of extra money offering this vital service) might literally go to prison for stealing this money that never even existed. It does have its own unique culture you'd need to spin up on to really grok what's going on. For example it just calls the Queen "Brenda", and various government agencies get more apposite names like the "Fundamentally Supine Agency". And there are a lot of running jokes after existing for so long.

amiga_500 6y ago
It's basically what the press looks like when they are doing their job. They are privately owned and on a mission to tell the truth, not to make as much money as possible. Hislop and before him Cook are actual real people trying to do something good instead of just attempting to get rich for the sake of it before dropping dead. There are lots of in jokes and also "code phrases", such as "tired and emotional" == drunk, more here [1]. I used to subscribe to it but cancelled it after I left the UK. The UK press are an absolute disaster. Most are partisan, including: Telegraph: torygraph Daily mail: torygraph FT: bankers times Guardian: with you until you need actual help then it's back to mi5 Sun/Times: Murdoch incorporated Private eye is literally carry everything on their shoulders. There is nothing else. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_in_Private_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurring_themes_and_in-jokes_...