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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

It’s “great” if you believe in their ideology.

Watching 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.

The 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.

it'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

Yes, 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.

It's also pretty much a safe space for TERFs too.

I don't disagree, but I will point out that Sanders writes for them occasionally

Conservative 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.

Good 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.

"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.

This 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.

Unfortunately, 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.“

There 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.

Journalism 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.

You 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".

"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 )

If reality is subjective it must be objective too.

With 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?

I 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.

I'd put the Telegraph as the right wing equivalent of the Guardian. Biased in the opposite direction but relatively reliable too.

The telegraph is split brained where the reportage is excellent and the comment and opinion is the worst, shrill, reactionary.

The Guardian can have that tendency as well.

It _used_ to be, possibly, but it really went off the rails a bit during Brexit.

and 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.

The 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.

The Telegraph has long been compromised: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...

Having James Delingpole as climate change denial columnnist also is really unimpressive.

The Telegraph has become only one rung better than a tabloid... The Financial Times has taken the mantle for reliable, centre-right information, even if their focus is a bit narrower.

You neglected to state what their "ideology" is.

It'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.

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