to be glad that the Guardian is making enormous losses

[longfingernails]

www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-losses-reported-to-have-escalated-by-a-further-10m-to-68-7m-for-the-last-financial-year/

Great stuff. Their chatterati condescension, Islington moral vacuum and politically correct echo chamber has been a malignant blot upon our society for decades.

Let it wither upon the Viner.

The vacuum is the Murdoch empire! An narrow minded empire which annoyingly swings public opinion. The guardian is needed to contrast/balance this. Yes it does need a shake up

I am a subscriber to the Guardian.

Seamus Milne is a vile cunt who makes Kelvin McKenzie look principled. Leaving aside his enthusiasm for comprehensive education while his own children go selective (a piece of hypocrisy he shares with Corbyn, Abbott, Thornberry and most of the Labour Front Bench) there is the minor matter of his hard-on for Stalin. The left are bad enough when, like Corbyn and LIvingstone, they associate with Holocaust deniers but at least they have the decency to be vaguely abashed about it and to at least pretend to not actually be themselves holocaust deniers. Milne is an up and up denier of Stalin's killings, minimising the number, defending the motives.

tea and kittens - brilliant!!

Don't be such a Sillybillsykes! Why would I want to read Pravda?? All I said was that a commercial success is often funded by less than altruistic behaviour - is appealing to lowest common denominator. An authoritative, challenging and well balanced press is surely what we all want. And saying goodbye to the Guardian is not going to help that!

The guardian is needed to contrast/balance this

Has anyone who doesn't already agree with the Guardian's worldview ever read it? Has it ever changed anyone's opinion?

Yes - they should focus more on Prince Harry, how to make money on property in London, new cures for the diseases that come with old age, and stirring up anxiety against immigration. This is what other papers have done and it's been very popular with the masses. Ordinary people aren't interested in the environment, in articles about gardening, or small scale businesses or foreign political activism.

As I've said, the Mirror is a left wing paper which is still successful because it still manages to address the concerns of it's readers and stay relevant to them. This is something that the Guardian used to do waaaay back in the day without reporting on Princess Di or Sam Fox's tits but has lost the ability to do.

I'm slightly perturbed by your claims of what the Guardian apparently doesn't do Mini. The Guardian was the first paper to get in on the making money on property in London schtick and went for the making money in property angle in a huge way right from the start of the bubble. It was totally irrelevant to vast swathes of what should constitute a left wing readership. Ditto it's pages of eye wateringly expensive consumer goods, £15k sofas, £5k coats, £2k dresses. And the food pages! Massively expensive meals with ingredients not available outside zone 2, let alone outside London and definitely not in the north.

Why on earth would people in back to backs with a yard or in flats (y'know, the working classes the left is supposed to appeal to) be interested in gardening articles? Wouldn't they be more relevant to those in big houses with big gardens. Small scale businesses? Yet another area where the Guardian concentrates on places selling expensive impractical mainly unecessary niche goods which will only be purchased by people with quite an excess of disposable cash. And foreign political activism is quite, quite irrelevant to swathes of people who feel unrepresented here but don't really see the likes of Guardianistas caring about that because they're just not trendy or exciting enough for them and they're probably a bit thick and like football or Prince Harry or something.

All the examples you've given are actually examples of their elitism if you dig a bit deeper.

It's a newspaper for very affluent middle class Southerners with lots of disposable cash big houses and gardens.

Perhaps if they actually tapped into things which interested the traditional left wing audience they might have more readers? The Mirror does it, they have lifestyle articles that suggest Morrisons rather than Waitrose and H&M instead of Hobbs.

The Guardian doesn't. And unfortunately if they're going to continue just to concentrate on an ever diminishing crowd of rich publicly funded/third sector/rich retirees in London without facing up to the fact they are becoming irrelevant them you're going to fail.

It's hilarious that even the bien-pensant Grauniad-central which is MN ends up contributing to its slow demise; by hoovering up ad revenue for quinoa-scented Boden that would otherwise belong very naturally there.

Why so spiteful?

The Guardian shows its true soul in the "Blind Dates" feature in the colour supplement. I don't think there's ever been anything which remotely approximates a working class occupation. The people are almost exclusively white (in what claims to be a diverse city), amongst whom gay man (but not, curiously, women) are wildly over-represented. It's basically Hoxton and Shoreditch talking to themselves.

The failure to report the Cologne attacks was the end for me with the Guardian it now caught in a pc nightmare where women's rights vs migrant crisis leaves it unable to fulfilling its remit as an intelligent news source

This. With knobs on.

I was so disappointed by their contemptuous and cowardly reporting of this and subsequent banning of comments on subjects they deemed too precious for mortal minds, or, God forbid, anyone with a different opinion.

To ban debate on Islam and immigration?

Who do these people think they are?

They drove hundreds of us traditional Guardian champions to the sites broad-minded enough to allow debate - Telegraph, DM, and non-UK media.

Spectacular own goal, banning free speech. The berks.

Don't be such a Sillybillsykes! Why would I want to read Pravda?? All I said was that a commercial success is often funded by less than altruistic behaviour - is appealing to lowest common denominator. An authoritative, challenging and well balanced press is surely what we all want. And saying goodbye to the Guardian is not going to help that!

Who are you to decide that the Guardian is an ultimately 'altruistic' voice? That again sounds very much along the lines of Pravdaesque thinking that one vein of opinion is the right, correct and morally good one above all others.

Personally I think that the Guardian has been very much concerned with a group of people who have made very comfortable livings out of their supposedly left wing philosophies whilst just window dressing this with lip service for altruistic concern for the left's core traditional issues.

Actually I think the left would benefit massively if it did die off. I think the type of thinking and opinions it espouses are more likely to kill off the left than help it.

The Guardian is a problematic and often hypocritical paper but no, I can't feel happy about the idea that soon almost all available print news media will be conservative drivel, tabloid hate speech, and soft porn. It's disturbing.

So, dear MNs- what is the best news source for balanced intelligent reporting?

I too am worried about the op.
That's an awful lot of vitriol for something you can largely ignore most days.
You are wanting a fight for a fights sake?

I have a feeling that OP may be from the Guardian subscriptions dept 😂

Squeegle, I read regularly:

The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, The Baffler, Metafilter (has a Guardian problem too alas), aldaily, longform...and a load of others but those are the ones I dip into, when I'm on my tea break etc, most.

So, dear MNs- what is the best news source for balanced intelligent reporting?

Are you seriously trying to claim that the Guardian is balanced? Now that's funny.

The trick is to know the bias of what you're reading, and read a good selection of opposing sources and also research the claims being made. And don't limit to traditional print media. I read the Guardian, DM and Telegraph online, plus Huff Post, Buzzfeed, Spectator, New Statesman, Private Eye, Mumsnet and a lot more besides. Relying on any one source for 'balance is wilfully naive.

I do find the attitude of Mumsnet posters who just read the left wing press because they've decided that it's correct and don't want to challenge themselves a bit weird. And frankly not indicative of anyone who seriously wants balance.

As I've said, the Mirror is a left wing paper which is still successful because it still manages to address the concerns of it's readers and stay relevant to them. This is something that the Guardian used to do waaaay back in the day without reporting on Princess Di or Sam Fox's tits but has lost the ability to do

Albeit with a much much sharper decline in circulation than its right-leaning counterparts.

That centre and left leaning publications have declined so much more than the right wing titles, and the reasons for it, makes for an interesting discussion.

Oh and The Canary of course, but I wouldn't call it balanced!

I won't have it in the house any more . Their decision to back men, any men, to the detriment of women and the silencing of women in their comments section did it for me. It's a left wing misogynistic back slapping bro -in.

YANBU, I gave up on it years ago.

I have a theory that LongFingernails is actually Laura Kuenssberg.

Albeit with a much much sharper decline in circulation than its right-leaning counterparts.

Not true actually.

www.pressgazette.co.uk/national-newspaper-abcs-june-2015-most-tabloids-suffer-double-digit-declines-sun-reclaims-sunday-top/

It's roughly inline with the decline seen for RW newspapers aiming at a similar market. So broadly speaking a decline which is probably influenced by changes in consumption habits rather than by editorial policy or movements in political opinion in the general populace.

Guido Fawkes after perusing the online papers plus I often learn more from links on mn discussions than from the actual papers. The problem is we all read the news with such a large case of confirmation bias the actual effort is seeing past that.

They are awful these days. They really are the voice of a tiny area of North London, magnified as if it represented the whole country. The news reporting isn't anything like it once was, and apart from one or two figures, the columnists are dire. They really are almost completely out of touch with the realities of labour (work) in this country - they are privileged people, who have been to privileged schools, who live gilded lives, who really cannot even begin to comprehend what life in a call centre is like.

There is no such thing as a paper 'without' a politics- they all have their axe to grind, every point of view is positioned etc etc. What has happened for me is that the Grauniad has abandoned its left-wing tradition, to move rightwards and become more centrist. It's stopped being left, and it's become social democrat, basically. And because these people live in a bubble, I don't think they have any idea that their views are out of step with the new, growing, grassroots democratic movement on the left, which is frankly out of patience with them.

But this shift has been happening for a long time - ever since they abandoned the broadsheet format and started publishing that ridiculous supplement way back when.