Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

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> WHat happened to the guardian?

In the aftermath of the Assange and Snowden stories, it was found that 1) hard-hitting investigative journalism can alienate government officials on which newspapers depend for more ordinary scoops, and potentially bring hassles from law enforcement, and 2) the big money to be made today in the advertising-based market is "snackable content" and stoking the culture wars. Consequently, The Guardian has become less and less distinguishable from other online newspapers.

What always irks me is when someone on a forum comments that an article at The Guardian is intentionally furthering some crafty and intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission. While The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes, the last decade-plus has seen an exodus of anyone attached to that 150-year-old tradition. Sincere political beliefs and idealism just don’t keep a newspaper going in our modern internet era.

>What always irks me is when someone on a forum comments that an article at The Guardian is intentionally furthering some crafty and intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission. While The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes, the last decade-plus has seen an exodus of anyone attached to that 150-year-old tradition. Sincere political beliefs and idealism just don’t keep a newspaper going in our modern internet era.

I fully agree and I know that was the initial purpose of the guardin, as a right winger I did not have a problem with that as at least that marxism was honest. However as you say all this suuden change pf marxists for neolibs has been horrible. Particularly within the whole context of the corbyn persecution, we cna only wish that real leftists are able to regroup and form a real opposition newspapers as both the labour and tories seem to be getting away with destroying the uk.

> intricate left-wing, working-class, Marxist, etc. mission.

I think this is a mischaracterization. When conservatives complain about the Guardian's (and the BBC's) left-wing agenda, they don't mean the older socialist working-class left. They mean the modern elite leftism focused on identity politics, critical race theory, critical gender theory, and so on. That conflict is still playing out, as we saw with Suzanne Moore's recent defenestration. Interestingly, this older generation of leftists are being published by traditionally conservative publications like the Spectator and newish center-right publications like Unherd and The Critic Magazine.

I agree, there are certainly modern conservatives who are objecting precisely to what The Guardian has become in the last decade. But one does commonly see comments left by people who completely missed these developments and think that The Guardian still represents the traditional Bolshie movements of 20th-century Britain.

I've never worked in journalism but how does "You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld " get past an editor?

I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"

Theres nothing better than getting done at the construction job site, having a few light beers, and arguing about arcane renaissance philosophers.

Oddly enough, I have been reading the English poet Peter Reading recently, who did work as a laborer for two decades (and then survived for a few years afterward on the dole), and yet certainly had read at least Larkin and Montaigne during that time. And then of course there is the former Eastern Bloc where even many workers built up home libraries of some pretty deep authors, because there wasn’t much else to buy with one’s wages than books.

There was a time in the late 19th and 20th centuries when movements for worker emancipation went hand in hand with efforts to make those workers more erudite and give them access to the same reading that the bourgeoisie enjoyed. I regret that we seem to have lost this in the modern era.

It's an opinion piece by a novelist. Why are you so bothered by references to authors you're not familiar with? I just googled the ones I didn't know. And it's a bit patronising to presume that working class people don't read literature.

"The Guardian was founded as a socially-engaged newspaper for the working classes"

My point is that the pieces like this are inaccessible for the vast majority of people. Its meaning could easily be conveyed without so many obscure references. If this were in a literary magazine then fine, but this is the Guardian.

> "You know something sceptical’s afoot when you find Larkin on your bedside table instead of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld " get past an editor?

> I think I'm pretty smart but I've only thoroughly read half of the authors mentioned in the post which seems to intentionally render itself unintelligible to anyone who identifies as "working class"

The sentence that you quoted isn't bad at all.

"Working class" doesn't mean "unlettered." And if you see a name that you don't know, you can always look it up. Just as people do when they see an ordinary word whose meaning they don't know.

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