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.)
That said, even if you believe that removing Hussein was a worthy goal, the Iraq War was a colossal shit show.
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
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.
Greenwald's journalism in Brazil has gotten Lula out of prison. Lula is likely to run for president, and that might change future of the country. The impact of the journalism Greenwald does is hard to overstate. What does it tell you about the Guardian that they dismiss him as a crank?
My opinion was that the Guardian is only worthwhile because it occasionally does some very good journalism, and that just about outweighs the pointless bullshit.
I don't really have anything to back that up though, just a general impression from reading it. So it's interesting to hear some evidence to the contrary. I have no idea if the Pulitzer is actually a good measure though.
A point of comparison: look at the Economist, which does basically no investigative journalism, but does produce fairly sensible opinion pieces (of course from a particular viewpoint, often a bit limited in their vision).
This seems like standard behavior for Greenwald: https://twitter.com/themattdimitri/status/138969371391236917... It's the same refrain as always: 'everyone is out to get me!'
Glenn absolutely doesn't believe that "everyone is out to get me", but he has, unlike many of his critics, faced very serious criminal charges by corrupt prosecutors, got guns pointed at his face, and he has to live with 24/7 armed guards because people want to shut him up for good. We're not talking about the casual death threats people receive just for being opinionated online, but the kind where they send you pictures of your house, your cars, and of the school your children go to.
Given that context, yeah, I understand why he has contempt for journalists who don't put anything on the line and spend their days on meaningless social media twaddle.
Maybe it’s both
Glenn has good reason to be paranoid. As someone who read his work for years, I’d say that within the past couple of years his writings have become more and more delusional. He left The Intercept over a fact-checking spat in which his editors were in the right, but he claimed censorship. The issue was over Joe Biden’s son, so a big step down from privacy, surveillance, and the work he did before.
I imagine few would be as honest as this
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-a...)
That's not an apology, that's disclosure. If they didn't add that you would get a stream of people saying "which you supported" everytime they talk about the war.
It seems that it took humans landing on a Moon to make them realize rockets can actually work in space.
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.
True. There appears to be no self-reflection that in the future, today's political and moral fashions will be seen as bad, in much the same way that the political/moral fashions of the past are seen as bad now.
“Massive backwards move in voting rights”. Wow! This sounds bad. So I search the article for what changed (so I can judge for myself). A few paragraphs about the civil right battles of the 60’s. A few more paragraphs about attempts to stop the new law. Ok...one sentence with vague comments about the changes - harder to do absentee ballots (how?) and you limits on helping people vote (like what?). Ok. Well those could be good or bad, depends on the details, right?
Well I finished the article and I still don’t know what these changes are or whether they are bad, because a 10 page news article didn’t explicitly say what they are.
And I’m not arguing the newspaper is wrong in their conclusion. But I read the news to be educated, not force fed opinions.
A better approach would be - explicitly lay out what the changes are (quoting the law is good!), then interview people from both sides on their viewpoints. I’m smart enough to understand the changes and determine which side is right. Hell, maybe both sides are kind of right? Crazy I know.
(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.)
More people should pay attention to Hugh Grant and his Hacked Off campaign about the abuses of the mainstream media in the UK.
wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/oct/17/everyo...
Ironic, considering the apologetic tone of the article overall...
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.
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.
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
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.
