Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Funnily enough, I quite like the Guide, partly because Joe Queenan and Byron Coley sometimes write for it, partly because it means I no longer have to buy that useless piece of toss Time Out anymore.

1. The simplification of the accusation may just echo what it asserts about the target (just as 'Dumbing Down' is a dumb, dull phrase);

2. If I don't like Triviality, why don't I read nothing but 10-page reports from the former Yugoslavia? It would be hypocritical of me to say that I simply wanted them to be SERIOUS and SOLEMN and RESPONSIBLE all the time. No, that's not it.

What I mean, I suppose, is that too many features, esp. in G2, now look dashed-off - half-hearted, half-baked, unconvincing, just cliché pies really. Today's Lara Croft piece was just the latest of a million examples. It feels (the terms are problematic here, I know) JOURNALISTIC in a bad way - trite, unconsidered, full of crowd- pleasing Received Ideas - rather than JOURNALISTIC in a good way (that is: dogged, resourceful, brave, mentally agile, snappy and what have you).

It's the world of second-hand Lifestyle phrases that bugs me. The way that adults can still write a phrase like "*that* dress" and not hang their heads in shame.

A rider to all my bile, though, is that my previous, more impressed impressions of the Guardian may just reflect youthful impressionability. (Sentence!) Maybe the same kind of crap used to impress me that now feels rubbishy, faux-zeitgeisty and embarrassing? Maybe, but I suspect it's a bit of both.

I agree about Queenan too. But most of all, I agree about Thomson. There's almost no point having a thread about Thomson, because people who know what they think about him already know it all and would just send in superlatives.

What the paper still has going for it: George Monbiot's column, the Diary, Steve Bell, giving review space to Ians Sansom and Penman, and the tv columns of Nancy Banks-Smith. (When N B-S finally pops her clogs I will have to think very hard about buying the paper.)

What is leading the paper ever closer to the abyss: consistently terrible pop coverage (honorable exceptions: Maddy Costa, Betty Clarke); the fatuous new Saturday mag (Zoe Ball on dressing? match the celebrity with the pet? that awful woman talking about words that should be banned??); Charlotte bloody Raven.

I agree with you there. They sucker you in with the G2 front cover (and the masthead of the main paper), but when you get to read the cover story it often appears cobbled together and lightweight. I imagine it must be difficult to fill that space with high quality stories day in day out though.

I actually like Peter Preston's awkward, staccato opinion pieces, come to think of it. But not the pompous ones of Hugo Young. Freedland is sometimes good at summing political issues up, but usually he 'sums up' too much - there's too much glibness in the way he marshals it all. (I admit again, though, that it's easy - even glib - to call someone glib.)

Penman strikes me as a red herring. I can see that he doesn't do that to you, cos you have some kind of investment in his career. I agree about Sansom (great left-back, mean penalty, blah blah) - in fact I think that the whole Saturday book reviews section is quite possibly the best feature of the paper. EXCEPT of course the footy. Heroes? How could I forget David Lacey?

BUT I think that you are wrong about N B-S. It doesn't surprise me that older folk make that judgement about her; it does rather surprise me coming from you. She has skills, I guess, but she's terribly repetitive; uses the same lines on the same topics year in year out. It's all too - yes - glib and easy, while dressed up to look aged and thus wise.

I only read it for the Guide and the job listings. Not that either has been particularly helpful lately... ;-)

There's a lot of irritating stuff, yes. My favourite columnist is George Monbiot, by a mile. Something I like about the Independent when I do get it is that its liberalism is less metropolitan and more about the common good. Needless to say, though, the Guardian's series of articles on public service under that very title were awesome.

Today's G2 seems designed to add fuel to my (f)ire: one page of 'Style' after another, including a column on Why We're So Disappointed That Madonna Employs A Stylist.

Also good in Guardian: John Patterson re. cinema.

oh god, ask hadley today is just... tooth-grinding.

"today"

"At what age is a man too old to wear band T-shirts?"

Martin McCall, by email

"About 15 - that young enough for you, Martin? And to follow one rhetorical question with several more, what in God's name is the point of band T-shirts anyway? To show your allegiance to a band? Do you think anyone else cares? To impress onlookers with your esoteric musical knowledge? See previous reply. To make people stare at your bony chest? Again, I refer you to the first answer. To show that you once attended a live gig? Wow, like, a pair of golden headsets to the guy in the Nirvana '91 T-shirt. In case you happen to bump into the lead singer on the street, he sees that the two of you are kindred souls and therefore invites you to join his band and you then go on the road and have all the manly bonding sessions followed by groupies that your heart could desire? OK, I'll give you that one, although this does suggest that you still harbour the fantasy that you might bump into Joey Ramone in Waterstone's.

"As for ladies in band T-shirts, give me a fricking break. First, gals, a badly cut, poorly made, oversized T-shirt is good for nothing other than wearing to bed and the gym. Second, too often women who wear band T-shirts appear to be going for what we shall call Groupie Chic. It is a style amply modelled by Kate Moss in recent years, and can pretty much be summed up as skinny faded black jeans, ankle boots, a ripped band T-shirt and a cropped fur jacket. In other words, a girlified version of Marc Bolan's or Keith Richards' wardrobe, as though the woman has been so busy, um, sleeping on the band bus she hasn't had time to clean her clothes, so she's now wearing ones belonging to her musical companion. This column has no time for such nonsense."

Yeah, because women have *no* interest in music whatsoever except for sleeping with musicians. What CENTURY is this cretin from?

I think I stopped wearing band T-shirts by the time I was 23. It wasn't necessarily a conscious move tho. I doubt I will ever wear one again tho - I guess it seems lame unless it's an old obscure or overlooked thus hip act (even this I dunno about). I don't notice many people over 20 wearing them. Does Matt DC still have that Save Ferris T?

I only want to sleep with musicians if they are hot as they are (their musical ability is pretty irrelevant in fact).

dear teh grauniad - a long time ago/we used to be friends...

It went downhill after I left.

or were you PUSHED?

http://homepage.mac.com/alexinnyc/.Pictures/Photo%20Album%20Pictures/2007-09-02%2015.37.57%20-0700/Image-D15E03FF59A011DC.jpg

heh. (sorry alex, no harm intended)

http://www.abc.net.au/sport/thesportsdesk/images/200607/20060707henrydive_derblog.jpg

xp

i was being harsh really. i don't care what's on other people's t-shirts that much. just trying to work out why i stopped wearing/wouldn't wear band t-shirts myself.

Any t-shirt which isn't plain white clearly sucks that's why.

i couldn't agree less

I still wear band t-shirts if I like the band. Why not? I don't *define* myself or my personality by my music tastes any more, I haven't done that since I was about 18. But that's not the same thing as wearing a band t-shirt.

I suppose the fashion journalist in discussion cannot fathom the idea that clothes are just something you put on, rather than a definition of or statement about your personality.

This is definitely something that happens as you age - or rather, has happened to me as I aged. There's a subtle difference between Statement Clothes and just things you put on.

Guardian editorial worldview circa 2007:

http://www.astucia.co.uk/images/sce/galibier%20tunnel%20_three.jpg

why else would you buy a band t-shirt if not as a statement or definition of personality?

I didn't know it was a band t-shirt okay?

because you're cold xp

In the past I've usually just bought them as a keepsake of a gig I've enjoyed. The piece tracer quotes is idiotic fluff, obv. I'd be embarrased to admit I'd written that.

Because you like the design? Because you like the music? Because it was given to you (this is where most of mine come from)? Because it was a souvenier?

x-post

you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

because you like the music = statement/definition of you/your taste

given to you = not you buying

you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

No, plus I've only ever bought them @ gigs.

because you like the music = statement/definition of you/your taste

Probably yeah, but w/smaller bands there's also the knowledge that in buying it, yr helping to supposrt the tour.

i actually bought a comets on fire t-shirt solely because the design was so awesome. (it was at a gig, but they hadn't come on stage yet.) then i heard the music and i liked that too. i suppose if i hadn't liked their music, or thought it was boring, it would have posed a problem.

a friend of mine, who shall remain nameless so that alex in nyc doesn't stalk and kill him, bought a huge iron maiden patch when he was 14 and sewed it across the shoulders of his denim jacket. he had never heard a note of iron maiden, but he wound up becoming the biggest iron maiden fan i know, and even sung in a band later, where his vocal style was almost inseparable from bruce dickinson's.

my take on this: do not read hadley freeman.

this resolution made some time ago, stands as strong today as it ever did.

it's a crass and deliberately invidious piece of writing. such an attitude, if sincerely held, could be turned around on pretty much ANY choice of clothing. so forgeddaboudit

the last band t-shirt i bought - robyn!

alan i can't help myself, i know i'm sick and need help.

is there a thread for best band t-shirts? must see

Taste is something that I have. It does not define me. Clothes are something I wear. The statement I am making is "I don't really care about clothes any more."

If I'm going to make a statement about clothes, I'll wear a bright green paisley jacket to a dronerock festival where everyone else is in leather.

I suppose my Hawkwind t-shirt is a statement, it says "ha ha, I'm wearing a Hawkwind t-shirt, I care nothing for fashion, I am wearing the shirt of a band so deeply uncool you can suck my left one because I love them!" But it's certainly not a statement saying that I want to f*ck any of Hawkwind or that I have a musician boyfriend whose Hawkwind t-shirt I'm borrowing, which is the assumption of that article.

> I don't notice many people over 20 wearing them.

*SOBS*

> you wouldn't actually buy a band t-shirt because you liked the design but not necessarily the band tho...would you?

EAR t-shirt with the putney on the front = great. EAR live = terrible. (EAR on CD = ok, plus pram and stereolab were supporting)

WE HATE MUSLIMS (and everyone else not being able to have access to our journalism)

BRING BACK HANGING (receive a free wall calendar when you subscribe to the Guardian)

Burger King already did this perfectly

https://i.postimg.cc/CLNwXY5T/1-trq-EJ-om-Wkv-C9OGl5T1Ijw.png

WE LOVE HUNTING (out fresh new writers and challenging the status quo).

WE RESPECT AND SUPPORT TRANS PEOPLE (being excluded from public life)

FUCK THE POOR bastard who has to write these

TOMMY ROBINSON IS RIGHT (wing, however you'll find no such views in our content)

WE SUPPORT DONALD TRUMP ('s removal from high office, btw please send us some money so we can run thinkpieces from anti-trans activists)

GYPSIES SHOULD BE GASSED
about our award-winning coverage of travellers' rights

TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN
in name only - don't worry, we're still morons

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/18/reform-tory-defections-robert-jenrick

imagine paying John Harris to write stuff

spending the first two paragraphs talking about UB40 is god-tier harris-brain

that was about as far as i got. what a cunt.

"Kemi Badenoch will surely now be asking herself who the next Rat In Mi Kitchen will be"

Are Guardian readers worse than they used to be?

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2026/feb/05/class-barriers-and-crude-definitions

Just shoot me. No, not me, them.

This is so lame by @guardian. The story about Labour Together spying on critical journalists is now their front page "exclusive."

A - It's not their exclusive - myself and @obornetweets wrote about this 4 months ago.

B - They effectively bury the role of Paul Holden and… pic.twitter.com/xEhpavB3Zj

— Richard Sanders (@PulaRJS) February 6, 2026

typical fucking vile, shitty Graun, there is an important story here and they bury the anti-left factionalism that is at the crux of the story. And also don't mention that one of their own psuedojournalists/grifters/stenographers (whatever the fuck you want to call these wasters) smeared the S African investigative journalist Paul Holden as being investigated as a Russian asset, which is the default smear by all UK state ghouls these days against anyone who is either anti-war/left-wing/anti-genocide or critical of the Labour Right.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/16/the-hill-i-will-die-on-being-a-dj-isnt-a-proper-job

what a tool.

jfc what a take so battered and hackneyed that it could actually be improved by AI. Also jfc what a cunt.

In what other field is taking the credit for somebody else’s brilliance so venerated?

Phil Mongredien is joint production editor for Guardian Opinion and Long Reads

I see the rest of UK media's coverage and outrage of the Labour Together journo intimidation scandal is following the Graun template by only reporting on the right wing Murdoch journos who were the victims of it. Poor little smol bean Murdoch journos, boo hoo.

x-post

If the “hill I will die on” article had restricted itself to just complaining about the phenomenon of celebrities becoming DJs, it’d be a better article.

Genuine DJing with turntables, beat matching etc is a skill. Entertaining a lukewarm crowd and getting them onto a dancefloor and keeping them there is also a skill, as is picking out obscure tracks that people haven't heard before and still getting and keeping them there. It is perfectly possible to be drunk, stoned or otherwise under the influence and be a complete wallflower for the entire night (speaking from personal experience) thus refuting one of the fella's (who I assume is hiding behind a pseudonym - it bluddy well sounds like Mondegreen!) main points.
I hope that DJs comment on the buffoon en masse and totally skewer him!

A thing you often get when this pov is dredged up is people assuming doing a pill makes any music sound good, I guess because they like terible music and did a pill once, then felt ashamed that they enjoyed a terrible DJ.

Professional football isn't a job. I saw a guy in a Mr Blobby costume kick a ball and everyone cheered. Anyone can do it.

That 'hill I will die on' column is pure cuntsville.

I love that he defends his position by saying he used to write for dance music magazines, but only mentions David Guetta, Calvin Harris and Paris Hilton as people who "just play other people's records"

It doesn't even make sense given Harris and Guetta make their own records. The hallowed territory of "I made a record" in which everyone is a genius.

Paris Hilton has made at least one record iirc.

Wonder how many issues of the dance music magazines he contributed to prior to being given the heave-ho.

how he worked at these publications without understanding the most fundamental things about dance music is a real head-scratcher

i almost feel bad for him, like did he not realise this is how he was going to come off? the commissioning editor must have known

This is just the most quick and tawdry clickbait, probably scribbled it out on the bus on the way to school that morning, I wouldn't analyse it any deeper than that

Many such cases when it comes to quality journalism.

I wonder who'll be first to just dispense with the pretense of news coverage altogether and go all op ed all the time.

"That 'hill I will die on' column is pure cuntsville"

It confused the heck out of me. The column seemed to appear from nowhere, without any announcement. At first it wasn't obvious that it was a series rather than a one-off. The articles are essentially "toilet rolls should face the wall" or "you're supposed to leave the toothpaste in your mouth" e.g. they radiate contempt.

I was particularly confused by this one, PDAs on the morning commute are never acceptable:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/02/pda-morning-commute-never-acceptable-hugging-kissing

It confused me because I recently replayed the STALKER games, and I was reminded of the pre-smartphone period when video games had the player's objectives on a hand-held PDA, despite being set in the future, because the designers hadn't anticipated smartphones, because they were hack frauds. Just like how golden age science fiction stories from the 1940s and 1950s had interstellar travel and talking robots, but computers still had clicky-clicky relays, and they still communicated with printed slips of paper, because the writers were hack frauds. As in Space: 1999, for example, where Main Mission spits out little bits of paper even though paper would logically be very precious on the moon.

I mean, why didn't the writer say "smartphones"? Even when PDAs were a thing, I don't recall people using them on the morning commute. They were too bulky, and there was no point. And then it dawned on me that the article wasn't about PDAs at all. It was about public displays of affection, at which point I lost interest.

The cast of writers seem to be a mixture of unfunny humorists, unfunny stand up comedians, and unfunny comedy writers that I've never heard of, who had one or two pieces published in The Guardian five years ago. Perhaps the newspaper had some money left over at Christmas and wanted to give it to some of the editor's friends.

Technically some of the articles have had lots of engagement - the DJ one has 679 comments from The Guardian's diverse readership of white male pensioners and white male ex-pat pensioners - but they're embarrassing. Behind it all I keep thinking that I could have done a better job. The key would be to pick an incredibly minor, granular complaint, and treat it with the utmost seriousness, and keep hammering away at it. "And now we move on to liars". It would have to drink from a different well, an altogether more interesting well, a well of mad obsession.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/18/hazardous-substances-headphones

Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project
Substances include chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminisation of males

Putin again?

thank god all keyboards and mice are made from the highest quality PFA-free plastics, eh?

I'm not clicking that link but the quoted bit reads like the Daily Mail. Classic Graun

Such deeply right-wing vibes off the words "the feminisation of males"

it's alright, I personally never use modern headphones as a sauté pan

I spent years trying to find my holy grail, a teflon-free rice cooker. And the one I found was amazingly cheap and I only just found it an hour ago. Can't even be arsed thinking about what goes into headphones.

if they really have new info on a health risk then it would be great if they didn't write it like a daily mail moral panic story

Broke: sissyfied
Woke: sissyfried

Sissyfried Sassoon

Benediction: one of the truly great late period Terence Davies movies

just one threading this in on the basis of a Siegfried Sassoon pun

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HBe6RjNXsAAtCF4?format=jpg&name=large

more hilarious music opinions from these turkeys

Pippa Crerar promoting this story that fails to mention her own central role in Labour Together’s attempt to smear and intimidate journalists is a massive conflict of interest. https://t.co/8WAwkZlVpR

— Karl Hansen (@karl_fh) February 21, 2026

the fucking brass neck of Pippa. Just utterly shameless when if she actually a gram of professional pride she'd doing harakiri. The Graun have been running this story since a few weeks back in a truncated form, completely erasing Paul Holden, the formidable investigative journalist who broke this story back in september. And being completely fucking wilfully oblivious to the part in the scandal played by their roving stenographer/pseudojournalist knobhead Pippa Crerar

Also, Holden says Crerar told him the paper had seen information that he was being investigated by security services. Yet The Guardian now reports there was never any investigation. So did Crerar fail to verify Labour Together’s bogus claim and plan to run the smear anyway??

— Karl Hansen (@karl_fh) February 21, 2026