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The Guardian is simply a truly great paper with excellent writers. Maybe that's their secret?
by puttycat 2y ago
The Guardian is simply a truly great paper with excellent writers. Maybe that's their secret?
- briandear 2y agoIt’s “great” if you believe in their ideology.
- scheeseman486 2y agoConservative leaning newspapers weren't always total dogshit and good reporting is good reporting, regardless of ideology. This is a belief that you don't seem to share, given you make out ideology to be the problem as opposed to the quality of the journalism itself. Very shallow thinking and it's a perfect exemplification of poor media literacy.
- DeathArrow 2y agoGood reporting is not skewed by ideology. Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides. Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago"Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides." Nonsense. Good reporting is about carefully filtering the evidence and reporting the essential stuff. Sometimes that's heavily skewed to one "side" or the other. What's suspicious is when it's always the same side.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoThis is more precise but you probably mean the same thing. Just that discussion has degraded toward the idea that there are always political sides to every fact, the "everything is political" crowd.
- thesumofall 2y agoUnfortunately, in today‘s world facts are interpreted as ideology. Take climate change: with the given scientific consensus you don’t need to „present all sides.“ A factually correct report will present the consensus. And still, some people will take this as „ideological.“
- mojuba 2y agoThere is no "scientific consensus" on things like the Israel-Palestine war. It's incredibly difficult to be impartial on some of this type of issues. You could say humanism is the absolute variable good journalists could stick to, but the Guardian seems to be going beyond that, deeper into the left ideology. I'm still a big fan, regular reader and supporter of the Guardian, but I do at times skip over some of their more openly leftist pieces.
- chgs 2y agoJournalism isn’t getting one person to say it’s raining and one person to say it’s not raining. It’s to look out the window and report reality.
- thworp 2y agoYou look out the window and see rain. I see light drizzle. A journalist writes about meeting a subject of his article in a "raging autumn storm".
- hk__2 2y ago"Reality" is subjective and not always so easy to observe. What about political debates, economy, social issues? I don’t want to read a journal that tell me "this politician said that", but one that tells me _why_ they said it, in which context, if this is "right" or wrong, why, what does the other side says, etc. (all of this thread resonates well with my last HN submission btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538847 )
- raxxorraxor 2y agoIf reality is subjective it must be objective too.
- lordnacho 2y agoWith all due respect, this strikes me as a middle school opinion on how media should work. > Good reporting is not skewed by ideology. You can't not have a perspective. You can be upfront about what your perspective is, while giving reasonable time to other perspectives. > Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides. Here I think the school-age lessons about what is fact and what is opinion does us all a massive disservice. > Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols. If you can make a good argument supporting your demonization or praise, why not?
- raxxorraxor 2y agoI believe you are wrong about what quality reporting is about. Journalism degraded because of the economic situation they find themselves in, but also because the school of journalism degraded. Maybe as a reaction to economic woes, but it certainly didn't not revolutionize the craft and instead did away with some quality aspects. > school-age lessons You could elaborate on this "argument", but we would probably disagree about the problems of modern journalism. > If you can make a good argument supporting your demonization or praise, why not? Because this is a more or less proof you didn't write an article to inform the reader and that you had other aspirations. You also lose the trust of your readers, but of course you always can work from the minima some papers find themselves in. Boulevard can be economically viable. Be that as it may, to be a successful journalist is difficult today. And if you are too successful, you probably have a lot of enemies in your own trade.
- concordDance 2y agoI'd put the Telegraph as the right wing equivalent of the Guardian. Biased in the opposite direction but relatively reliable too.
- te_chris 2y agoThe telegraph is split brained where the reportage is excellent and the comment and opinion is the worst, shrill, reactionary.
- robertlagrant 2y agoThe Guardian can have that tendency as well.
- rsynnott 2y agoIt _used_ to be, possibly, but it really went off the rails a bit during Brexit.
- graemep 2y agoand what they do have in common (although the guardian has become less so recently) is that they both do publish some opinions that greatly dissent from their editorial line.
- WickyNilliams 2y agoThe Telegraph pumps out a lot of culture war trash now. You could argue the guardian pumps out a lot of socially liberal stuff, but I'm not sure it actively engages in culture war stoking.
- pjc50 2y agoThe Telegraph has long been compromised: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-oborne-resignation-senior-writer-quits-telegraph-dramatically-over-hsbc-allegations/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob... Having James Delingpole as climate change denial columnnist also is really unimpressive.
- lores 2y ago
- DidYaWipe 2y agoYou neglected to state what their "ideology" is.
- IshKebab 2y agoIt's a fairly left wing paper, but not crazy-left. Very middle class. "Guardian reader" is pretty much a social class. They even had a dating service for a long time! I'm not criticising; I think they're a little too indignant at times - woke even - but overall they're probably the least objectionable newspaper in the UK, maybe the world. Kind of like the left wing mirror of The Times.
- tmnvix 2y agoWatching them throw Sanders and then Corbyn under the bus was a wake up call for me. It's not the leftist paper it makes out to be, but strongly establishment.
- pmyteh 2y agoThe Scott Trust established its editorial line as "liberal" (in the UK, not the US sense) and it's generally hewed to that. Despite occasional flashes of appearing radical it's an establishment, social liberal paper that believes in slow reform. I also wish it were more of a leftist paper but it is what it is.
- permo-w 2y agoit's sad but I would imagine that it probably wouldn't exist as it does today if it genuinely rocked the boat. at some point--probably in the 70s and 80s when the establishment was really reasserting itself--there would have been some kind of hostile takeover or other method of silencing it. maybe that did happen in fact, I do not know
- griffzhowl 2y agoYes, and they threw Assange under the bus too, after being one of the papers working with Wikileaks on the original cablegate revelations. It was one of their own journalists, Luke Harding, that originally exposed the unredacted cables from Afghanistan and Iraq by publishing the password to the encrypted file containing them as a chapter heading of a book he wrote on the episode. That's what forced Assange to publish the unredacted cables in the first place, so that the informants mentioned in there would know what information about them was insecure. (Apparently the file had been shared around a bit, but the information was secure as long as the password wasn't public) The Guardian (and Luke Harding especially) have never really come clean about this, which is grating since publishing the unredacted cables is the ostensible reason for Assange's decade-long persecution and imprisonment, and the Guardian essentially followed the establishment line over this period, arguably then being complicit in the persecution of Assange for something which Harding was really responsible for. Of course, the primary reason for Assange's persecution wasn't the release of the material per se, but to discourage him and others from further exposing govt crimes.
- concordDance 2y agoI wouldn't call the writers excellent. The guardian is famous for its typos. (Separately the writing style is mostly not to my taste, but that's subjective)
- rsynnott 2y agoThat’s a failure of editing, not writing. Though it’s mostly a historic thing in any case; its heyday was about a century ago.
- DrBazza 2y agoIt’s not called the Grauaniad for nothing. Private Eye have mocked it for years.
- chgs 2y agoPrivate eye, who famously backed Wakefield and led to thousands being unvaccinated. Still haven’t seen an apology. Maybe they like rfk.
- arp242 2y agoI have seen Ian Hislop list that as one of his greatest failures in an interview. I don't know if they printed an apology and obviously they were dead wrong here, but they (or at least, Hislop) have recognised it as such.
- musiciangames 2y agoFrom Wikipedia: In a review article published in 2010, after Wakefield was disciplined by the General Medical Council, regular columnist Phil Hammond, who contributes to the "Medicine Balls" column under the pseudonym "MD", stated that: "Private Eye got it wrong in its coverage of MMR" in maintaining its support for Wakefield's position long after shortcomings in his work had emerged.
- arp242 2y agoMeh; it's mostly little more than a meme. And also something from the age of printed papers and typesetting errors.
- lores 2y agoI'm surprised at all the love for the Guardian... It's better than nearly all the rest, sure, but it's still often outrage-bait or inaccurate information. Media bias / Fact check give them a rating of 'Mixed' on accuracy: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ I had a free subscription to the Financial Times through a weird cookie misshap, and I was impressed by the quality of the reporting and the fact they were happy to shoot down corporations behaving unethically, which I hadn't a priori expected.
- thinkingemote 2y agoLindsay Anderson the left wing film maker always read the telegraph to be able to see the lies more clearly. A centrist these days might want to read both that and the guardian to steer a true course!
- permo-w 2y agothat is my method, but I have to remind myself that the telegraph is evil every time I open it because otherwise it can start to get to you
- FabHK 2y agoIn my view, both the FT and The Economist are better, more balanced, more centrist, and less conservative/neoliberal than many people give them credit for.
- christkv 2y agoThe economist used to be that. Its unfortunately degraded a lot over the last decade.
- justincormack 2y agoThe FT is definitely the best UK paper. Expensive.
- cma 2y agoMediabiasfactcheck is run by someone on the Council of Foreign Relations fwiw. While their Foreign Affairs publishes stuff critical of US policy, they are heavily America biased.