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.

This is the Islington I am familiar with.

I wonder how much those flats sell for? Half a million?

I'm sure that when the glorious day comes, Polly and her ilk will cry all the way to her villa in Tuscany.

And how do you imagine the thoughts of Polly et al appear in the paper? The highly paid columnists will find media work elsewhere - employment prospects for the subs, IT team, sales dept, etc will be much, much worse.

they are privileged people, who have been to privileged schools

Is there anyone writing for the Guardian who both (a) went to a state school and (b) is planning to or actually does send their child to a state school?

And I agree with you BIllSykesDog, both that the hypocrisy and patronage of the Guardian harms the left and that it's better to read a wide variety of sources that acknowledge bias than a single source that pretends to neutrality. News and politics are not neutral. They are not maths papers.

But I don't really know that many people who read actual papers any more anyway? I mean of my peer group. A few mates who have outdoor jobs do - on the roads etc - and obviously magazines or tabloids - Mirror or Sun -as no one reads a broadsheet paper on site -it's just too much fucking paper! You need a table really. Oh and my dad does; he is 72. Guardian all the way for him. I do buy the paper copy of the LRB if I am in a train station etc but I don't get a paper at home. Who can be arsed with the recycling! :P

I'm not a fan, but I'd be sorry to see them go. The more view points the better in a society , no ?

I don't want anyone to lose their job.

I rarely read The Guardian because it aggravates me. But, I think it's healthy to read a different view sometimes, and healthy for our democracy to have competing voices and sources of news. So I would not want it to go.

X-post Carl. Agree completely.

What paper do you read OP?

The highly paid columnists will find media work elsewhere - employment prospects for the subs, IT team, sales dept, etc will be much, much worse.

So perhaps the columnist might dial the "poor people! know your place!" rhetoric down a bit?

I was particularly amused by Zoe Williams piece on Boris Johnson before his first election, although she did have the decency to roll it back slightly a year later. Her main complaint was that Johnson is posh, privileged and isolated from reality. Williams went to Godolphin and Latymer School and then Lincoln college Oxford. So much for the proletarian touch, eh?

Bill, you seriously seem to want to fight today! My question was just that - a question about balanced reporting! I wasn't claiming the Guardian is. My previous comments alluded to the fact that you had said that the daily mail kept relevant, and I said that is because it's appealing to our baser instincts. No one is saying the guardian is faultless, but my point still stands- a variety of sources is needed for balance, we don't want a world full of only the Daily Mail and the Times. And it was a serious question to this group and I'm grateful for the replies. Don't worry about my bias by the way, I do read plenty, thank you, I'm just interested in everyone's views.

And sorry for folk losing their jobs of course.

I once worked at a newspaper ( The Independent ) and the majority of people who get it out are working class.

Guess I'll go off to subscribe too OP, thank you.
I honestly can't think of one other paper that is just a little bit left. Yes, the Guardian is far left but id prefer to read that than any of the other Murdock papers, they are all hideous and make me want to scream at just their headlines let alone what's actually inside too. Thank god we have just one paper that's brave enough to put over another point of view. But, you know OP, maybe we should all be just fed the same old lies?
I do agree they will also get it wrong, I remember an article slagging off private education that was then shown to be written by a person whose kids were privately educated! But it's not on a daily basis like the others, example this week of Daily Mail screaming about another terrorist attack this week in Mumich, didn't see a headline the next day saying it was actually a young boy fixated on high school murders and mass shootings, never mind, let's just keep up the hysteria.

I'm not pleased, though I loathe what the Guardian has become. I think it is a tragedy that a formerly quality left-leaning broadsheet has deteriorated into a a sort of moral sticking plaster for the self-regarding urban middle classes.

I think you can point the finger at numerous things, not least the rise of the Internet and decline of quality journalism towards clickbait generally, but also more generally the decline of much of the left post-Thatcher into moral posturing, identity politics and increasingly a fear and contempt for the working class.

Though it is tempting to feel schadenfreude about this I think it's actually disastrous for political discourse in the UK and I'm concerned about what is emerging to fill the vacuum.

My previous comments alluded to the fact that you had said that the daily mail kept relevant,

You appear to have repeated reading trouble, as that's the second time you've said that. In fact, Bill said that the Mirror remained relevant. Mirror, Mail: I suppose from the perspective of Islington, they're all working class and smelly tabloids.

I find it bizarre that you criticize the Guardian for not appealing to the Mirror's readership, Billsykesdog. Why should it?
The Times does not appeal to the Sun's readership.

Yes, the decline of the Guardian is in parallel with what has been going on in the Labour Party generally - a mishmash of Blairite champagne socialism and corbynesque leftishness - the Labour Party is all over the placeZ

The Times does not appeal to the Sun's readership.

The Times isn't teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and having quarterly rounds of redundancies. At the moment, although who know how long it will last, it isn't desperate for readers, and unlike the Graun it has managed to impose and maintain a paywall which is, one gathers, reasonably lucrative.

The Graun is turning into PBS, for those that have experienced American radio and TV. Self-regarding virtue signalling with a charming amateur flavour, interspersed by quarterly begging sessions to get sufficient money in. Ironically for a long time the Scot Trust was propped up by Autotrader, while PBS's most popular radio property was Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers' blokey car phone-in.

Tanith, because, at least once upon a time, the right and the left had different political positions on the mixing of the orders in society. The Sun and The Times are both right wing, conservative papers. They believe in the class system and work to maintain it. So that's not hypocrisy; that's what they actually believe. The left, by contrast, should work to break down the divisions in society, not reify them.

the decline of the Guardian is in parallel with what has been going on in the Labour Party generally

If you're as rich as Milne and Toynbee, you can regard politics as an extension of the Oxford Union, with being right far more important than being in office.

The actual working classes they pretend to care about (they've met them, while getting their holiday homes refitted) of course need a Labour government, even a compromised one, to protect them from the Tories. Milne couldn't give a shit about that: he's already saying that you don't measure the success of political parties in election victories.

cuboid you're right!! I did get confused . I must have been Daily Mail obsessed. I guess that's the problem- we sometimes think we've read something we expected! Mind you my point still stands as actually it is the DM which has the healthiest circulation/ audience figures and this is what is so dangerous. I don't live in Islington btw, do you?

God I sound like I'm straight outta 1934, hahaha. But it's true!

The peity, hectoring and hand-wringing can be irritating, I agree.

The readers' comments are heavily moderated and therefore unbalanced. And they're very picky about which articles can generate comments in the first place (and not always for obvious legal reasons).

The Cologne thing was disturbing and it's for that reason mainly that I won't be subscribing. It was a turning point for me, somehow.

The loss of jobs will hit junior people hardest, so I can't celebrate that. Toynbee etc will be all right, they'll continue to do the television and radio circuit and live off book royalties. There'll always be platforms available for them.

Wishing for people to lose that jobs based on the political views of their employer is a real dick move.

You sound like Liz Jones on meth.

To be fair to the Graun over Cologne (and I think it was a shocking failure, but it's of a piece with their refusal to cover Rotherham/Rochdale) they did at least publish this:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/cologne-attacks-hard-questions-new-years-eve

It goes off-track at one point, with a confused piece of near victim-blaming in the paragraph starting "Liberals shouldn’t be afraid to ask hard questions." which doesn't live up to its billing as it only asks easy ones. But it's OK as a piece.

Sorry Lolo, not convinced. Sounds to me like you're telling the Left what they should believe and defining their reading matter for them. Very right wing of you!

It's ludicrous to expect one newspaper to appeal to every single person with Left political views. Trying to insist that it does actually leaves some people without a voice - I can see how appealing that might be to the Right.