To think that the Guardian's standards have really dropped lately

[paintandbrush]

like within the last 5 years or so. Once you look past the unbearably condescending tone and amount of PC bollocks, the quality of the writing is so poor! ie. mix-ups between to/too, stuff you would expect an intelligent 12 year old to be capable of.

I appreciate it's hard for papers to survive these days but seriously, it might help if they employed someone literate. Hate to admit it, but I've really enjoyed the Spectator's free trial thingy lately despite not being that much of a Tory. It's nice reading the scribblings of witty, educated journalists who've actually been paid.

It used to be Guardian vs. Times, now it's just sunk into Guardian vs. Daily Fail. Caitlin Moran had the right idea jumping ship.

I don't. I would react the same way to the representation of a former senior UVF member as having "a lifetime of internationalism and antiracist solidarity" without mentioning the many needless violent deaths they were responsible for. I find it bafflingly patronising that you assume I don't know my history and am "ill-informed". "The Irish Problem"; what a 19th century expression.

Well I'm another who, when reading a reference to Adams record for 'internationalism and anti racist solidarity' thinks that the writer is a thick twat who is so mired in cultural relativism (perfect for the Guardian) that he conveniently forgets his record of being a murderous bastard.

It feels like a newspaper fracturing slightly under commercial pressures and a change of editorial direction.

The Guardian has long resisted the paywall model, but the consequence of that decision leads to a certain type of article becoming more prevalent, focusing narrowly on their core readership, and this has made the paper a bit more obnoxious to me. Personally, I would rather they had gone behind a paywall if it meant that standards didn't slip, but I respect the choice they made.

I still think they do important investigative work, and their place in the global network of broadsheets that aggregates their response to big stories such as the Panama Papers helps a lot. That said, once you look past those big stories, the rest of the regular output feels like it has dropped a notch in the last 2-3 years. There is an increasing tendency to put racial or feminist slants on subject matter to which there is no logical connection. Some of this blooms into the cartoonish, which does a massive disservice to the causes they claim to be serving.

Then again, all newspapers have their upsides. I despise the Daily Mail, but they clung on to the Stephen Lawrence story long after others had given up. It may be a horrible, vindictive rag, but credit where it is due.

I agree about the columnists. I think the Guardian would benefit from having less regular opinion pieces from the same authors and more opinion pieces by experts.

Odd how some posters think the point of the thread is that the dm is better than the guardian, when what most posters are fed up with is how standards have slipped in the guardian. But that's typical of the paper they support - never let the evidence get in the way of your view of what's going on

oops (still think the Guardian has gone to the dogs though)

You were right the first time lucydogz- of course I'm not saying the DM is the same as the Guardian, just that the direction the G's going in is regrettable.
By the DM comment, I meant to highlight the fact that the left (and quite a few MNetters) have been sucked into an obsessive ideological tussle with the DM, an absolute piece-of-shit rag.

As an NI catholic, I am astounded that anyone in their right mind would support Adams!?! He's a bigmouthed murdering bastard (as has been stated here). I hate the fact that Corbyn's buddying up to him as a suitably right-on cause. There aren't too many round here who want out of the UK, I'll tell you that much.

I've been reading the Guardian for 30 years. I felt its quality declined in the early 90s, recovered, and then took a tumble again after the millenium. The problem it faces (in company with all broadsheets) is that its revenue does not cover the cost of its journalism, and the Internet has made matters worse.

I find the Guardian's news reporting OK but so clichéd that I genuinely wonder how hard they have actually tried to get at the facts. I reckon there isn't much money to go round.

As for their opinion pieces, I hardly read them now. Every issue discussed seems to get put through an Orwellian versificator to get the correct result, which seems to be according to the following human rights hierarchy, which at present is something like this:

1. Refugees / migrants.
2. Ethnic minorities.
3. Transgenderism.
4. LGB.
5. Women.
6. Elderly people.
7. Men.
8. Non-ethnic minorities.
9. Religion.

However, there is also a specific-over-general principle inamongst all this. So a white man ranks low in the Guardian's hierarchy. But if he decides that he is female, he shoots up to #3. Religion is right down the bottom (although I note that the Guardian keep a tame vicar to write for them from time to time). However, if it is a manifestation of a refugee's culture, it shoots right up. To be fair, this is how human rights theory works: when two human rights collide, there is no principled way of deciding which right should win out - it is just whatever is considered best at that moment.

I also dislike the sneering at DM readers. As I like to tell my Guardian-reading mother, antisocial, violent, dole-bludging party animals really do exist, and if you have to live next to them the last thing you want to read is how such people need sympathy and understanding - particularly if the writer is happily insulated away in Hampstead.

Having said all this, I find myself returning to the Guardian website more than any other media outlet, basically because all the others are worse.

I am so disappointed with how the Guardian has thrown women under the bus - Rochdale, Cologne and the complete lack of any balance in Trans coverage. You would literally never know that any feminists or LBG groups were concerned about Trans activism from reading the Guardian - even BTL comments are censored.

I have been reading it since my teens. It was always left-leaning of course, but there used to be a much wider spectrum of views. The journalists came from a variety of backgrounds - for every Polly Toynbee, there was a working class lad/lass who'd come up through the apprentice route. I often disagreed with the more radical ideas, but it was interesting to read them, and they were balanced by other viewpoints. Now the entire paper seems to be written by a tiny clique of white, metropolitan, privately educated under 35s and conformity to their narrow world view is compulsory. None of them has any insight into how sheltered and restricted their lives are, none of them has any real-world experience and they all reinforce each other's prejudices. It has become an echo chamber for the opinionated self-righteous.

No, she stated quite clearly that it's because all the others are worse. Either you don't understand what cognitive dissonance is, or you didn't read her post properly.

Shiny I agree. That's why I really liked the Independent in its heyday - the opinion pieces were so varied, from many different perspectives. I find Guardian opinion pieces so utterly predictable and boring. What I actually do with the Guardian website, is I've bookmarked the identity pages of a number of the most intelligent and well-informed below-the-line commenters. I go to those pages first, and read their comments, which are usually much more interesting than the actual article. I might then go to the article and read it, or not.

I think my dissolution with the Guardian came during the Scottish indy referendum.

All those columnists whose only experience of Scotland appeared to be trips to Edinburgh during the Festival (and in the case of Owen Jones probably not even that) pontificating about how wonderful independence would be. I was on the point of giving up completely when the editorial , to my surprise, finally came out in favour of No.

The Guardian's stance on nationalism has always been problematic- if it's Celtic based good- everything else bad. I recall years ago a breathtakingly stupid article by Jeremy Hardy defending the IRA which , even though I can't recall the content , still makes me think he is a self-satisfied tosser every time he appears on Radio 4.

Its feminist based opinion pieces are quite remarkable in that they usually manage to annoy every one from the radical feminists on FWR through to the "pc gorn mad" types.

Don't want to go off-message here, but like I said, there's almost nothing worse than IRA/UDF apologists, especially if they start up the bleeding-heart act while cocooned somewhere in London.

Also their coverage of Bloody Sunday (way back when) was an absolute disgrace- along the lines of 'oh those civil rights protesters all deserved it anyway'

Did anybody see AA Gill's piece (in the Sunday Times I think) about the Scottish ref? I was expecting better considering his father was from there. Condescending just-off-the-train type stuff by a London daytripper.

And sorry Guardian, hate to remind you but trans issues only affect maybe 1% of the population, if even, whereas we ladies make up the human race. Priorities.

Oh great, a man is here to tell us our opinions don't matter.

Stepinto, it was Andrew Norfolk of the times who broke the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. So not entirely true about the sexual abuse of women not being on their agenda.

Voyage-

Kestrel is right - you didn't read my post properly. I think broadsheet journalism is going through a major crisis. The Guardian is just the best of a very bad lot at the moment and I don't think it deserves criticism for being short of money. However, I think it does deserve criticism over its CiF pieces - there must be thousands of people with all manner of perspectives who would be willing to write for nothing or a token payment, yet its contributors all seem to be so much alike that they must all be from the same sort of background and with the same experiences.