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What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
- fenderbluesjr 5y agoNo mention of Nazi Germany, I'm curious to know what their position was. My understanding is that The Times was very sympathetic to Hitler's claims of not having bad intent regarding Czechoslovakia and regularly railed against the government for not giving their support
- Veen 5y agoI'm not sure what their position was at the time, but they published articles in defence of Chamberlain and his policy of appeasing Nazi Germany as recently as 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/oct/17/everyonehasgotina https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/oct/17/everyo...
- yosito 5y agoThis seems like an act of penance by The Guardian.
- dazc 5y agoNo mention of your support for the invasion of Iraq then?
- nindalf 5y agoIraq: the case for decisive action. Published 18th Jan 2003. (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jan/19/leaders.politics https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jan/19/leaders.politic...).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Macha 5y agoToo recent, easier to bash dead people than people who may still work for them.
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- rjzzleep 5y agoWhat do you mean? Iraq, Afghanistan and Lybia were mistakes? I thought the only mistakes were that the public found out what human rights abuses happened and that the facts were made up. /s These publications all have blood on their hands. "We made a mistake" that isn't even honest doesn't cut it. The only real unfortunate thing here is that people like Trump get to use these peoples lies to push even greater lies.
- koheripbal 5y agoSaddam gassing Kurds was made up?
- Kye 5y agoI think the first paragraph exceeded the bounds of an effective /s
- GlennS 5y agoStill possible the Iraq war could turn out to have been the right course of action. Probably not, but unclear at this point.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoIt's possible that invading Canada today would turn out to be the "right course of action" but that doesn't mean we should kill a million Canadians to find out. That said, even if you believe that removing Hussein was a worthy goal, the Iraq War was a colossal shit show.
- curation 5y agoAs a Canadian I am grateful!
- bavell 5y agoOur wars in the middle east over the last 3 decades are objectively catastrophic failures. The liberties we have ceded, the lives lost and displaced, the destabilization of an entire region, the resources spent on the military industrial complex.... I could go on but it's abundantly clear that the negatives far outweigh any marginal benefits that may have occurred.
- hermitcrab 5y agoYes. But we kept getting the oil. And that was the whole point, wasn't it?
- weswpg 5y agoat which point do you think it would be more clear what the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq have been? Someone born on the day of that invasion would be an adult by now so it should be possible to come to at least a few conclusions about all that death and destruction.
- k1m 5y agoMedia Lens have done great work analysing the Guardian's output over the years, particularly their support for wars: https://www.medialens.org/?s=guardian https://www.medialens.org/?s=guardian I think anyone really interested in the Guardian's failings will learn more from Media Lens than any self-critical piece published by the paper itself. Their books Guardians of Power and Propaganda Blitz examine the Guardian's output too. (Disclosure: I'm currently the webmaster for the site.)
- thinkingemote 5y agoYou might possibly be interested in newssniffer which tracks changes to articles.
- k1m 5y agoThanks, it's a great site!
- drcongo 5y agoMedia Lens' reporting on The Guardian's Corbyn smear campaign was exceptional.
- fallingfrog 5y agoI suspect not enough time has passed for them to see the period in living memory clearly.
- drcongo 5y agoAnd no mention of their endless attacks on Jeremy Corbyn based wholly on lies fed to them by the Blue Labour crowd.
- tsegratis 5y agoCan we have all newspapers do this? I imagine few would be as honest as this
- collyw 5y agoEven this seems pretty dishonest, when all the entries are from before the time when many of the Guardian's current staff were not alive.
- shipman05 5y agoThe KC Star apologized for its past racist coverage last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949271163/the-kc-star-apologies-for-past-racist-coverage-wants-others-to-get-the-poison-ou https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949271163/the-kc-star-apologi...
- nindalf 5y agoI imagine many would be, so long as sufficient time had passed. If you’re apologising for a 20 year old mistake, the person who made that mistake probably left the newspaper a while ago. You don’t have to interact awkwardly with them. Nor are they in a position of power from where they can prevent the apology from being printed. The NYT once published a hilarious apology 49 years after they made a mistake. The original author was long gone by then. > A Correction: On Jan. 13, 1920, "Topics of the Times," an editorial-page feature of The New York Times, dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert H. Goddard, the rocket pioneer, as follows: > 'That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." > Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. The only exception I’m aware of personally is the Economist consistently apologising for supporting the Iraq war in the 2000s, and continuing to do so every time the decision to enter the war is mentioned. This from 2018, 15 years after the war started > Iraq, in other words, is doing well. Some will argue that this justifies America’s invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein (which we supported). It does not. Too much blood was shed along the way in Iraq and elsewhere. (https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/28/fifteen-years-after-americas-invasion-iraq-is-doing-well https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/28/fifteen-years-a...)
- sirsinsalot 5y agoBy The Guardian.
- bogle 5y agoThanks for pointing that out. I almost missed it.
- gizmo 5y agoThe Guardian has in 200 years only won one Pulitzer, for Glenn Greenwald's reporting on intelligence agency wiretapping and other malfeasance. And what does the Guardian do? They repeatedly malign Greenwald and publish falsehoods about him. See this thread for a typical example: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976 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 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359544245238005760
- pmyteh 5y agoGiven that the Pulitzers are only given for work that appears in a US publication, that's not terribly surprising. And saying that the Guardian 'doesn't do real journalism' is fundamentally unserious. I have huge problems with their editorial decision-making, and their attitudes to a number of issues I know about and care deeply about. But they are a serious newspaper, doing far better journalism than the vast majority of other papers. In the UK they are one of only a few still making even a pretence of being proper journalists. The fact that they are as reluctant as anyone else to issue mea culpas, and have decided that Greenwald is a crank, doesn't change that.
- koheripbal 5y agoI think it's pretty fair to say The Guardian doesn't do any investigative journalism. If you look at almost any front page article in the last x years, you will be hard pressed to find anything that isn't purely interviews and sound bytes regurgitated from other sources.
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- vinsci 5y agoGuardian's "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies" Documentary: Guardian hacks continue PR war against WikiLeaks wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThat doesn't even include their recent ridiculous phony Assange Manafort meeting they still haven't retracted.
- k1m 5y agoThat Guardian's treatment of Assange has been awful. I collected a bunch of attack-pieces and lies about Assange published by them here: https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/ https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/
- spindle 5y agoTHIS. I believe the Guardian is good on some topics, but after their treatment of Assange stories I find it very hard to read anything they publish.
- thu2111 5y agoA rather strange article. In some ways quite perceptive and reflective, but in other ways the opposite. 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 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.
- ploika 5y agoAn editorial is not the same thing as an article from the opinion pages.
- nailer 5y agoMore recently: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-mark-duggan-headline https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-m...
- slx26 5y agoAh, the eternal question. How do you respond to this? Applaud and encourage even more thorough self-reflection, or criticize because the self-reflection was not thorough enough?
- mrec 5y agoCall me cynical, but this report was commissioned back in July of last year. Releasing it today, when it's guaranteed to be eclipsed by dramatic local and by-election results here in the UK, has a bit of an odour to it. (The report has had some attention from the influential political muckraking blog Order Order over the past few days, which is probably why they didn't feel they could sit on it any longer.)
- Tarsul 5y agoIs it an eternal question? Because I have a hard time finding examples where cynicism is the better course of action than pragmatic encouragement.
- koheripbal 5y agoYou will notice that the errors they chose to list are ones that accentuate their current political agenda. It is therefore not self-reflection at all. It is merely doubling down on existing dogma by recasting contradictory prior politics as "wrong". It actually highlights exactly what's wrong with "journalism". The Guardian doesn't report, it advocates. It intentionally provides biased views in order to sway readers - the exact opposite of what I'm looking for in a news outlet. I want news that has LOTS of contradictory points of views. One that presents facts without opinion, and strives to relate events without an agenda. The Guardian is a failure of journalism. If you are not paying for news media, you are the product, not the consumer.
- thinkingemote 5y agoThe left wing film director Lindsay Anderson who directed the movie "If..." starring Malcolm McDowell about an uprising in a British public school was asked why he didn't read The Guardian but the right wing Telegraph newspaper. He replied by saying that it was easier to spot the lies... 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.
- sega_sai 5y agoThis is a nice one: “It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.” I think the quality of predictions in geo-politics or economics hasn't improved much since then.
- fallingfrog 5y agoIt is striking that the mainstream positions today would have been considered radical leftism at most points in the past. 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.
- bioinformatics 5y agoIn my view, it was only one.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> Fear of the mob dominated Ironic, considering the apologetic tone of the article overall...
- Proven 5y agoDid they ever get anything right? I can't recall single instance.