Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

tbf this sort of thing is pretty much why they employ Simon Jenkins

He’s so utterly deranged. I started reading him in the runup to the Iraq war, on which he was very good, so I formed an inaccurate picture of him as a sensible person

This is top tier shitposting tbf, gotta salute

Simon Jenkins is a floating voter?

No, that's an accidental spoonerism by the subeditor

lmao

:)))

Thread delivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/11/royal-academy-summer-exhibition-2024-review-london

"Pampered pets, polite portraits and enough wan landscapes to fill a field – this show mirrors the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Tory misrule"

art in keith's Britain will be amazing! Can't wait

this would be the same jonathan jones who managed to file numerous anti-corbyn articles in the mid-2010s despite being an arts correspondent would it

the RA summer show is always garbage and always has been a showcase for posh mediocrities with a hobby.

I know, but I love the implication it was good before 2010.

thought the bump would be about this

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/11/europe-right-immigration-britain-nigel-farage-rishi-sunak

Not so much a useful idiot as a plain old useless idiot.

On the left is The Guardian refusing to use any pronouns for Lia Thomas. On the right is The Times that genders her correctly throughout. pic.twitter.com/sevbtC8Ma0

— Lee Hurley (@HLeeHurley) June 13, 2024

No, it's actually quite simple, England have had an easy draw in Euro 2024. End of discussion.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jun/28/england-easy-draw-euro-2024-history-southgate

Ita true that Southgate has been good at negotiating easy groups that past Eng managers could've fumbled. There has been no catastrophic knockout in three tournaments. Unprecedented for Eng since Venables took them through Euro '96, which is the only time I enjoyed Eng play in a tournament.

Even so, they have not had to face an in-form big team in the QFs, SFs in those tournaments and when they did (France in Qatar) they lost. The other loss being Italy in the final.

Reality is that Southgate is now most like his recent predecessors. Eng most certainly can lose to Slovakia and Southgate will be gone the min that happens.

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/01/greece-introduces-growth-oriented-six-day-working-week

Pro-business government says measure is needed due to shrinking population and shortage of skilled workers

Helena Smith in Athens

Didn't bother reading past the byline, are they going to go full on ramping up the transphobia for the dying days of the campaign now?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/02/this-isnt-a-culture-war-uk-women-feel-politically-homeless

It's weird because they do have passages like this:

Many of the women who responded to an online callout or spoke to the Guardian expressed frustration with politics that had failed to address poverty, inequality, healthcare for women and children in particular, the climate and Brexit, and voiced acute fears for their and their families’ future: mothers of children with SEN (special educational needs) or mental health issues, mothers unable to afford childcare, or with adult children unable to buy homes, unpaid carers, women feeling exploited in low-paid jobs with no prospects of progression, and women with disabilities fearing harsher welfare conditions in future.

Scores also said they were concerned about rising extremism and political polarisation, misogyny, violence against women and girls, antisemitism and Islamophobia.

About a fifth of respondents said they had either decided to spoil their ballot paper or were considering doing so, among them Sharon, a 60-year-old social worker and “lifelong Labour voter” from London who does not own her own home and has no savings. Her two adult children are unemployed, despite having gone to university, each owing about £40,000 as a result. Private rental housing was “beyond their means”, she said.

And then others where it's just "some people like this, some people do not, The Nation's Women are a land of contrasts"

“This is about supporting our sisters in prisons and women’s shelters,” said Anne, 61, from Burnley, Labour’s “most winnable seat”.

I wrote about 1997, and celebrating and relishing a Tory defeat even if it might not be the Labour government that you wanted. Because even when you feel cynical, it's important to give children and young people something to hope for https://t.co/b5OOgxAzHJ

— Rhiannon L Cosslett (@rhiannonlucyc) July 4, 2024

Great way to crush your child's hopes well done.

children and young people everywhere hoping the Labour Party all spontaneously combust

Haha that article is fucking brutal

I’ve seen this before. Ingrown bangs, they get right into the brain

“If you have reservations about starmer’s potential to effect real change, why not just pretend you don’t? It feels nicer”

you could have been doing that the whole time! For the children!

it may never get worse than this

ended up reading the actual article here and Jesus is it ever repulsive. appears to go totally unquestioned that the guy was looking at images of child abuse because of ‘porn addiction,’ an exculpatory narrative he seizes with both hands https://t.co/vkX8ge7scL

— November (@postoctobrist) July 28, 2024

it’s interesting this - does no one look at page layout any more? i guess it’s possible not - and that’s been converted into online “layout” but i don’t know enough about journalism these days to know.

it was the porn-addiction that made me do it is not what someone who has realised they are a sick fuck and they need treatment would say. I remember another upper-middle class guy (who was a complete dick on another message board) who was arrested during operation ore, and he said paying for this type of material was simply just a "morbid fascination" he had developed. Just shame the devil and admit that you are a sick fuck. Exculpatory narratives in grim cases like this don't help anybody. And lol, a new nadir for the Graun - appealing to the PIE lobby amongst their readership!

if i was going to publish a full blown "complaining to the manager about being treated like the little people" piece i'm not sure a self-confessed nonce would be my first choice of subject

I slightly resent that people get paid to write this badly:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jul/28/cd-sales-rise-taylor-swift-collection-nostalgia-90s-oasis-bashy-metronomy-kitty-liv

I got bored after a few words. But it reminded me that, stupidly, I got rid of the case and inlay card of my copy of Kevin Rowland's My Beauty. I still have the compact disc, but not the rest of the packaging. As with so many people I consigned my compact discs to a set of CD wallets, reasoning that the plastic cases and inlay cards were bum slops.

It strikes me that there are two lines on the graph. The big cash money graph. One of the lines is "rareness and desirability of Kevin Rowland's My Beauty on CD" and the other is "obscurity of Kevin Rowland in general". The first line is very slowly going up, but the second line is going up even faster.

So I need to think of some other kind of retirement plan.

Multiple xps I honestly found that article an absolutely shocking and repulsive read. Obviously the denial is really entrenched and I get the whole “I don’t want to tear my family apart aspect” in the abstract…But this wasn’t in the abstract. They live this life where his internet activity is monitored, where they’ve abandoned basically everyone they knew, because this man was viewing CSA images! The police categorised some of them as the most extreme!

The first time I viewed illegal images was horrendous. I closed it down, thinking, “Never again.” Unfortunately, I went back. It was always for short periods, then I’d delete everything to stop myself accessing it. But after a couple of months I’d look again. The guilt was extreme.

When they asked if I’d ever been on the dark web, I said yes and they arrested me. Then they made me tell my wife, which was a nice twist of the knife.

Then the Lucy Faithfull helpline opened on Monday and I was able to talk to someone. They stress you’re not a bad person, you’ve just made bad decisions – that probably saved my life.

There’s a sort of dehumanisation that happens in the court system. Suddenly going from being a person to a criminal was a shock.

it's pretty astonishing that somebody, maybe multiple people, thought this was an ok piece to publish

it all comes down class solidarity - a really fucked up variant of it. If this guy worked in a warehouse and lived in a council flat then the they wouldn't have even thought of running such a distasteful, downright repulsive piece. Because he's "one of them" then somehow (lol , fuck knows how tbh) it becomes a human interest story that is relatable to the posher end of their readership. OMG this guy is getting treated like common a criminal by our cold, uncaring justice system and he's POSH - will always be a thing in the UK broadsheets. I recall there being a lot of Jonathan Aitken interviews after he'd done time. But on the other hand he wasn't doing time for downloading child porn.

I was going to say the same last night but calz has just nailed it.

They stress you’re not a bad person, you’ve just made bad decisions

You read the Guardian, you vote Labour or Lib Dem/Green when Corbyn was leader, you can't be a bad person.

OTM Calz
I can't really express my feelings on that piece but the older I get the more I realise how common, accepted and excused it is

On the subject of class-ism - both in the media and society in general - I always remember this column:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/23/hans-rausing-addiction-reality-drugs-policy

It's about Hans Rausing, the billionaire Tetra Pak heir and pharmacological explorer. He is thoroughly ingrained in the upper echelons of the British class system. "But he's Swedish" - yes, but that is one of the acceptable foreign nationalities.

Back in 2012 he failed to sound the alarm after his wife overdosed at his extremely expensive house in a posh part of London (the column describes it as "immaculate" and "otherwise pristine"). He ended up living with her dead body for three months while he went on a huge bender. After the police broke in and arrested him he was given a suspended sentence, and a few months later he returned to the house and apparently built an underground £2m extension to house a cinema and swimming pool.

A couple of things stood out about the column. There's the fact that his sister, the billionaire owner and editor of Granta, was given space in a newspaper to run damage control. None of us would have had that luxury. There's the fact that the first half of the article moans about property damage - "several people, seeing Hans drive erratically, had called the police. By then he must, I think, have been known to them, because what they did, in that immaculate house, was to walk up the stairs and kick in the locked door to the bedroom." It appears he was let off with a caution that time, despite possessing an impressive grip of drugs, which raises the question of whether a course of rehab at that point might have helped him. And then the second half of the column complains that no-one wanted to bust down his door when there was an actual emergency, which strikes me as incoherent.

Behind it all is the implication that if you're very, very rich, you have emotional depth and can experience emotional pain, whereas if you're poor you're not a fully-fledged human being, and you definitely don't get space in a national newspaper to argue in your defence. It also reminds me of the trope whereby when middle class people spend a fortune on drugs they're daring pharmacological explorers, whereas you or I are just statistics.

As far as I can tell Hans remarried and got over it, although sadly his second wife, Julia Delves Broughton, died earlier this year. Her older sister was Isabella Blow! I did not know that.

The paper has a weird thing to be obsessed by but its often with this class angle. AI will destroy middle class jobs. UFPs will destroy your health. At least they try and talk about cost but it still ends up as an ad for Waitrose.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jul/31/avoid-ingredients-you-dont-know-25-of-the-healthiest-ultra-processed-foods-you-can-buy

there is such a M+S/Waitrose bias it should contain a "includes paid promotion" banner. I don't believe any processed food is good for you, even all this higher priced shite from the posh supermarkets is trash food imo.

If you don’t have any homemade soup stashed in the freezer, this Waitrose version is a passable replacement.

Ah, just as well my freezer is brimming with frozen homemade tomato soups.

Graun v similar to the Daily Mail in this regard, these are just clickbait lifestyle blurbs for the affluent middle class aren't they?

the framing isn't even very different

Soup is so easy and relatively cheap to make, no-one should be giving advice on the best processed soups in tins/plastic. I appreciate some people financially struggle and might not have the time to cook, they won't be Guardian readers.

The volume of tomatoes (2kg/5lbs) needed to make a good soup is probably a bit unwieldy for most people.

What I’m seeing in mass produced ‘quality’ food is weird emulsifiers that wouldn’t go in a normal recipe, or things like pea protein as enhancement when peas and pulses are becoming more common as allergens.

I never have enough fresh tomatoes, but using a mix of fresh tomatoes and tinned plum tomatoes works fine for me.

If you have a greengrocer you get on with, ask for all the split toms they’ve got at the end of the day for sauce or soup. They will give them to you for a pittance and maybe even for free.