What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
theguardian.comNo mention of your support for the invasion of Iraq then?
Media Lens have done great work analysing the Guardian's output over the years, particularly their support for wars: https://www.medialens.org/?s=guardian
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.)
Media Lens' reporting on The Guardian's Corbyn smear campaign was exceptional.
You might possibly be interested in newssniffer which tracks changes to articles.
Thanks, it's a great site!
Iraq: the case for decisive action. Published 18th Jan 2003. (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jan/19/leaders.politic...).
Too recent, easier to bash dead people than people who may still work for them.
And no mention of their endless attacks on Jeremy Corbyn based wholly on lies fed to them by the Blue Labour crowd.
I suspect not enough time has passed for them to see the period in living memory clearly.
Still possible the Iraq war could turn out to have been the right course of action. Probably not, but unclear at this point.
It's possible that invading Canada today would turn out to be the "right course of action" but that doesn't mean we should kill a million Canadians to find out.
That said, even if you believe that removing Hussein was a worthy goal, the Iraq War was a colossal shit show.
As a Canadian I am grateful!
Our wars in the middle east over the last 3 decades are objectively catastrophic failures. The liberties we have ceded, the lives lost and displaced, the destabilization of an entire region, the resources spent on the military industrial complex.... I could go on but it's abundantly clear that the negatives far outweigh any marginal benefits that may have occurred.
Yes. But we kept getting the oil. And that was the whole point, wasn't it?
at which point do you think it would be more clear what the consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq have been? Someone born on the day of that invasion would be an adult by now so it should be possible to come to at least a few conclusions about all that death and destruction.
This is a nice one: “It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.” I think the quality of predictions in geo-politics or economics hasn't improved much since then.
The Guardian has in 200 years only won one Pulitzer, for Glenn Greenwald's reporting on intelligence agency wiretapping and other malfeasance. And what does the Guardian do? They repeatedly malign Greenwald and publish falsehoods about him. See this thread for a typical example: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976
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
Given that the Pulitzers are only given for work that appears in a US publication, that's not terribly surprising. And saying that the Guardian 'doesn't do real journalism' is fundamentally unserious. I have huge problems with their editorial decision-making, and their attitudes to a number of issues I know about and care deeply about. But they are a serious newspaper, doing far better journalism than the vast majority of other papers. In the UK they are one of only a few still making even a pretence of being proper journalists. The fact that they are as reluctant as anyone else to issue mea culpas, and have decided that Greenwald is a crank, doesn't change that.
I think it's pretty fair to say The Guardian doesn't do any investigative journalism.
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.
I'll concede that they occasionally do real journalism, but they also publish falsehoods and they either don't retract/correct at all or quietly edit published articles. Their fact-checking is awful, and you can just see on twitter how they deal with that. To me that's disqualifying, but you do you.
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?
How absurd, a 200 year old British paper only winning one American award that was only founded in the 20th century.
It started out as a UK newspaper but it has had an international presence for a while now (admittedly a small part of that 200 years).
This is interesting. I would have said the opposite.
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).
My impression of Glenn Greenwald is that he is either paranoid, or willing to stoke his readers' paranoia in order to attract attention.
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!'
You misunderstand what's going on here. Greenwald is making fun of people who consider themselves journalists but who spend their days trawling through social media to find things to create outrage drama posts about, instead of doing real actual journalism. The DNC operative thing is obviously not intended literally; it's like calling somebody a lapdog or a bootlicker or an apologist. Note that in that thread the response from the "Bernie-hating worm" was to tattle to youtube and demand the video gets taken down because he "fears for his safety". Good grief.
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.
> My impression of Glenn Greenwald is that he is either paranoid, or willing to stoke his readers' paranoia in order to attract attention.
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 don't care for Glenn too much but he's better than a lot of the other crappy grifters out there like the tool in the thread you linked to.
A journalist should neither accuse, without evidence, someone else of being a 'DNC operative', nor claim, without verifying, that that person opposes a particular political candidate. The gravity of slandering someone that way, to me, is self-evident. It doesn't matter if the person he slanders is a saint or a piece of garbage.but he's better than a lot of the other crappy griftersIf the person whose tweet I linked is truly a 'tool' (and I'm open to that possibility), then Greenwald could just have left it at calling him a 'worm'. That's fair game since it's a matter of opinion.
I agree and disagree. He definitely wasn't very professional in his remarks and could have toned it down but in that clip Glenn said exactly why he thinks that way. And this was on a podcast (i.e. his personal opinion), not an article posted to a news outlet.
The 'tool' even did exactly what Glenn accused him of on that thread, taking short clips of people he doesn't like out of context and disparaging them. Seems to be his MO. Again, I don't love Glenn but overall I feel he's decent and usually does actual journalism instead of playing silly games most of the time.
I'm sure Greenwald makes fair accusations at times. The problem I have is with the false accusations.taking short clips of people he doesn't like out of context and disparaging themThat said, I'll concede the point to you. For me to continue in an honorable fashion, I would have to listen to the Greenwald episode your comment references, which I was unaware existed. For all I know, in that podcast, he would convince me that both the problem claims are true.
The thing is, I do not want to spend the next half hour (probably longer) listening to a Glenn Greenwald podcast :)
> The thing is, I do not want to spend the next half hour (probably longer) listening to a Glenn Greenwald podcast :)
Can't blame you for that haha, there are better things to do. I'll admit my opinion of him dropped a little seeing that clip in the tweet you linked... just not very professional, even if the other guy may deserve it.
Who does real journalism in your opinion? BBC ? NYT ? What's focused on facts these days and not on opinions anc clickbait ?
Can we have all newspapers do this?
I imagine few would be as honest as this
I imagine many would be, so long as sufficient time had passed. If you’re apologising for a 20 year old mistake, the person who made that mistake probably left the newspaper a while ago. You don’t have to interact awkwardly with them. Nor are they in a position of power from where they can prevent the apology from being printed.
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...)
> 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.
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.
Saying "we were wrong" is an apology in my book. I don't know what you want, but this is sufficient for me. If you think your reading experience would be improved by grovelling, find the publication that grovels or has never ever made a mistake and read that. But for me, I'm ok with the Economist.
> If they didn't add that you would get a stream of people
A stream of people where? Only subscribers read this. Folks who have issues like you do wouldn't be subscribers to begin with. If they hadn't printed the mea culpa, few would have noticed.
> 49 years
It seems that it took humans landing on a Moon to make them realize rockets can actually work in space.
There's realising a mistake, and there's finding an appropriate moment to make an unambiguous and highly-visible mea culpa.
It seems far more probable that this is a case of the latter, not the former.
I am constantly seeing references in The Economist to things they've changed their mind about. Often the wording is something like this: It was often claimed (including by this newspapers) that ... However, ...
The KC Star apologized for its past racist coverage last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949271163/the-kc-star-apologi...
Even this seems pretty dishonest, when all the entries are from before the time when many of the Guardian's current staff were not alive.
Ah, the eternal question. How do you respond to this? Applaud and encourage even more thorough self-reflection, or criticize because the self-reflection was not thorough enough?
You will notice that the errors they chose to list are ones that accentuate their current political agenda.
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.
When, exactly, was this period of unbiased/opinion-free event coverage in UK journalism you apparently long for? You rail against “modern journalism” like it’s some kind of recent downhill slide, a by-product of modern political biases, but when was this not the case?
You're choosing to fixate on a characterization of the past you believe I implied - which isn't an important aspect of my comment.
Being unbiased, and offering multiple points of views is something mature readers value - both in the past and today. It is something a journalist's should aspire to as a matter of professionalism.
Can you make the honest argument that you want a news outlet to not even try to be unbiased when reporting to YOU? My experience with people who advocate biased journalism is that they want others to consume biased journalism that they agree with - because they believe they are immune to the bias.
If you are not paying for news, you are the product and not the consumer. And I specifically choose my news outlets based upon my perception of their quality of journalism, which heavily includes their degree of bias and the depth of their coverage.
I'd like to hear what publications are less biased (I won't write not biased because I don't believe in magic or miracles). Can you name just one?
I get the impression you want me to name a specific publication so you can argue that it is just as biased as The Guardian. ...which isn't the point of this conversation.
Can we simply agree that being less biased is better than being more biased, as a fundamental principle?
Or are you honestly making the argument that you prefer more bias in news you read?
I'm arguing that you can't name something like what you described.
Can we agree that being less biased is better than being more biased?
Prior to modern journalism, newspapers were directly funded by political interests. Now that advertising dollars no longer provide a somewhat unbiassed source of income, publications like the guardian are relying on direct donations from their readers and I suspect that introduces some bias as well.
> It merely doubling down on existing dogma by recasting contradictory prior politics as "wrong".
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.
Reminds me of the BBC news headline this morning: "The Conservatives have inflicted a _crushing_ defeat on Labour...". The BBC shouldn't be dramatising the news, they should just be reporting it factually.
That was a direct quote about the labour party by a member of the labour party, so that is factual reporting.
> Diane Abbott, an ally of Sir Keir Starmer's predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, tweeted: "Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy."
Granted though they've toned down the headline of the article to "Elections 2021: Conservatives hail historic Labour defeat in Hartlepool by-election"
News sources should not be using direct quotes for their article titles. That's just a way to skirt the illusion of unbiased reporting.
Unironic: I get more actual news from the world socialist website than from the Guardian. Aside, there is axios.com, or the news section of Wikipedia.
Then pay for it.
I do. I pay for the WSJ, the Economist, and a hand full of others.
The Guardian is terrible these days. You will notice that all the mistakes that they admit to are things from decades ago. There is absolutely no reflection on the current positions that they take. It's essentially more virtue signalling from them.
That’s journalism today. I read an article about the voting changes in Texas.
“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.
Call me cynical, but this report was commissioned back in July of last year. Releasing it today, when it's guaranteed to be eclipsed by dramatic local and by-election results here in the UK, has a bit of an odour to it.
(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.)
You can be sure that the rightwing press aren't engaging in this kind of reflection, however flawed. You aren't going to see "what went wrong at the News Of The World that led to its collapse" or "the Sun apologizes for its Hillsborough coverage" or "why the Times published a climate change denialist for years" or "has the Spectator engaged in systemic racism".
More people should pay attention to Hugh Grant and his Hacked Off campaign about the abuses of the mainstream media in the UK.
Is it an eternal question? Because I have a hard time finding examples where cynicism is the better course of action than pragmatic encouragement.
Guardian's "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies" Documentary: Guardian hacks continue PR war against WikiLeaks
wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html
That Guardian's treatment of Assange has been awful. I collected a bunch of attack-pieces and lies about Assange published by them here: https://theguardian.fivefilters.org/assange/
THIS. I believe the Guardian is good on some topics, but after their treatment of Assange stories I find it very hard to read anything they publish.
That doesn't even include their recent ridiculous phony Assange Manafort meeting they still haven't retracted.
By The Guardian.
Thanks for pointing that out. I almost missed it.
No mention of Nazi Germany, I'm curious to know what their position was. My understanding is that The Times was very sympathetic to Hitler's claims of not having bad intent regarding Czechoslovakia and regularly railed against the government for not giving their support
I'm not sure what their position was at the time, but they published articles in defence of Chamberlain and his policy of appeasing Nazi Germany as recently as 2007.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/oct/17/everyo...
> Fear of the mob dominated
Ironic, considering the apologetic tone of the article overall...
The left wing film director Lindsay Anderson who directed the movie "If..." starring Malcolm McDowell about an uprising in a British public school was asked why he didn't read The Guardian but the right wing Telegraph newspaper. He replied by saying that it was easier to spot the lies...
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.
In my view, it was only one.
This seems like an act of penance by The Guardian.
It is striking that the mainstream positions today would have been considered radical leftism at most points in the past.
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.
A rather strange article. In some ways quite perceptive and reflective, but in other ways the opposite.
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.
An editorial is not the same thing as an article from the opinion pages.