To delete my Guardian account

[Finlesswonder]

I'm fed up with them. They were always pretty heavy handed but now it's like they zap anything that doesn't perfectly tow their "party line". This morning I saw the most banal comment get deleted and I have also been modded for no reason IMO.

To top it all off I'm just so sick of seeing a "colonialism is alive and well: here's why" article literally every week.

AIBU to delete my account on the guardian and move to a new paper? Feels sad, I've been reading the G for 20 years. Where do I go?

Guardian, telegraph, observer, they all have strange paymasters

PMSL at people holding up The Times as some sort of bastion of fair and quality journalism. It became a tabloid years ago. Plus, Murdoch…

newnamethanks · Today 13:51

Somehow I'm not convinced this is a thread of ex Guardian readers. It's all a little intemperate

This puzzles me. First of all, what do you mean by 'Guardian readers'? Do you mean people who read/used to read the Guardian, or something more than that?

Secondly - it's a bit 'conspiracy theorist'. Why wouldn't pps be Guardian readers?

And finally, it's brought a smile to my face to suggest that Guardian readers are never intemperate!!

Try the FT, factual quality reporting
This

For decades I bought the Guardian every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday as a minimum, and was a frequent contributor to the letters page. Their support for various wars (most prominently the Iraq war) Ied me to take the Independent for a while, but I always came back. While I appreciated some writers - Aditya Chakraborty comes to mind - I was tiring of the American campus identity politics and the finger-waggings from journalists with zero suspicion of their own economic privilege, but the two outrageous 'reports' on the WiSpa incident were the final straw.

I read the Economist, not because I like its enthusiasm for capitalism and its advancement via military confrontation, but because it reports on things that happen across the world rather than just in the USA and Europe. And has little to no lifestyle and celebrity pap. And tbh I don't see the Guardian as left-wing anyway.

@Flockameanie The Times is a mixed bag. I loathe some of its columnists but it actually reports on things in its news pages, including actual figures and details instead of generalisations and unreferenced assertions.

Times 2 is largely tabloid trash but its crosswords are also good. So it works for me.

And yes, @newnamethanks I am a bona fide former Guardian reader. Odd that you think we’d bother to make it up.

Well I was raised on the Guardian, almost weened on it. It is crap, because it is no longer prepared to have diversity of left and liberal opinion on it. And it's never been some extreme lefty rag, because frequently on the issues of the day it bottles it and is probably anti left.

I suppose there is a fair point about the ex Guardian reader who now goes for the Times alone. The Times really is the establishment, written for it, and it's Murdoch which was an anathema to a leftie Guardian reader. My father is an ex Guardian reader, but what he can't admit is he got more right wing with age as well as the Guardian being badly written and shallow. People change newspapers because their views change, imo.

However, it can be properly decried as badly written and opinionated to the point of little news.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

• Stephen Colbert

Why not?

There’s obviously a fair few who feel the same way, and used to read it

That The Times has columnists you strongly disagree with is a good thing. It allows for a broad range of opinions, rather than forming an echo chamber.

I binned mine. Got too fed up of the terfs are evil line

I think you need to ferret around for news. Take Ireland, there's almost a media black out so I went fishing and found a website recommended for the Irish to read that mainstream media there just aren't doing. It is interesting and shocking

I think it’s this. The other papers, are not perfect at all. But they don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. The Guardian does make a huge thing about having the moral high ground, but only to make the liberal elite feel smug.

Which is why after years of being a Guardian reader, I just got fed up of reading articles which were mainly to make middle class people feel less bad about the wealth and privilege, as long as they could read about the wind rush over their avocado crumpets in their half a million worth London house they could pretend they were nothing like the Telegraph readers, or even worse, those working class Daily Mail readers.

Pity as I loved the Saturday bundle with the TV! It was like part of my weekend routine. And although it was always a bit arty smug it did used to have a more genuine social justice motivation, which was more based in reality.

Maybe read something whose philosophy doesn’t lead to mass starvation?

YANBU. Go to the antipodean fruit forums or one of the few other outlets that respects freedom of speech these days.

I not only read it for years, I actually wrote for it too. Intemperate, my arse. What an absurd thing to say.

The Guardian doesn't have a broad range of opinions. Any dissent has been bullied out.

It used to be considered wrong to give Murdoch media money. That is still a common view on the left. A lot of history there as to why not.

True. It’s a common tactic for a kind of authoritarian left

It is bizarre to see arguments about Rupert Murdoch pop up. Yes. He is a media mogul. Yet if you go back to his roots he still has a wide range of media covering different demographics and political outlooks.

Rupert Murdoch is a capitalist providing a service for whoever wants to use it. That is and always was his aim. He knows what sells and keeps on selling it. Yet, there in his original holdings are still papers which are invested in reporting facts. I personally some past journos and editors from his papers and they are most certainly left wing and only left because of budget cuts.

And even on sky news in some countries, they have experienced political analysts from all parties sit on their discussion panels. It seems absurd to write off a huge and diverse media service. Surely people read a wide range of media these days and can separate crap reporting (and even in crap articles take away some learned information) with quality even within one mainstream media service.

Well, the argument about Murdoch goes back some way. That he was an effective breaker of unions with Thatcher, via print workers and anti miners, specific issues about Hillsborough and the lies printed about the people of Liverpool because it was good copy, and introducing Page 3 with its range of teenage girls.

That is why many people didn't like his media. On Sky, I don't have it myself. I don't buy the Times. It's a choice.

Does this mean there is nothing in the Times of any quality then no. And also Sky. But it's my money.

Most of the complaints there are about one particular newspaper. It's hardly the only red top, and most of those have plenty to object to - so I don't touch any of them.

Had to laugh at the comments about the centre-right Starmerroid Guardian echo chamber being ‘leftie’.

Following commenting being deactivated on my account by a particular butt-hurt weekend moderator who’s been hounding me with petty deletions and pre-mod restrictions for months because my comments haven’t pandered to their own bias, I’ve deleted my account and now fully intend to slate the Guardian and its jumped-up, hypocritical, faux-moral posturing at every opportunity.

As others have pointed out, the rag basically operates on the premise of “not being as bad as the daily mail is good enough” - bit like Labour under Starmer vs the tories then. There seem to be a fairly high proportion of older BTL commenters, several of whom seem keen to point out that they are expats and who quickly define themselves as old enough to know better than the garbage they repeatedly spout.

My own final comment on the site BTW, the one that led to my commenting ‘privilege’ being revoked and me deleting my account and was in response to an offshore keyboard ‘warrior’ who always pitches in under war pieces with his own warmongering non-equivalence and whataboutery non-solutions, was thus:

“We've had 40 years of liars running this country.

Failure now to oppose disproportionate IDF slaughter of innocent people is all part and parcel of Starmer's previous fake moral stance for political expediency.

People who support Starmer's position on Gaza based on their own desperate wish to see him beat the tories ought to hang their heads in shame.”

I well remember the Guardian's silence on Cologne. Does anyone have a link to the piece they eventually published? Or would that have been retro-edited by now? Thanks.

Ah yes all those expats who can't stand the UK and wax lyrical about their new adopted countries and how much better their lives are there, but spend literally hours every day obsessing over British politics