Going going...

[secular111]

I think The Guardian, if it doesn't sink in the coming week, News of the World-style, it is certainly holed below the waterline and, thanks to Viner and LOJ in particular, looks doomed. I don't reckon it can easily recover from its efforts to promote the 'Wi Spa hoax' hoax, and if anything LOJ seems intent on doubling-down and magnifying the damage being inflicted.

The weight of all-out SM condemnation of The Guardian for its now horribly-exposed efforts to try to pull the wool over the eyes of its own readers and subscribers about the Wi Spa scandal is growing exponentially.

And worse, sporting a copy of The Guardian is going to provoke the 'best check your hard drive' comments from now on, as the newspaper has committed itself to fully supporting white sex offenders, whilst it goes out of its way to disbelieve the five complainants - all of whom were Black women.

Some examples;

Katie Herzog about The Guardian - Twitter

Malcolm Clark about The Guardian - Twitter

Julie Bindel about The Guardian - Twitter

The Guardians own Twitter

Andy Ngo, who exposed the efforts by The Guardian to promote the hoax story that the Wi Spa crime was fake

Allison Bailey about The Guardian - Twitter

And that's just a fraction of the condemnation that can be easily found. The follow-up of course will be the essays and articles in Spiked, The Spectator, Telegraph, The Times...

And tomorrow glinner will be releasing his 'The Mess We're In Special' with The Guardian being a key focus.

That's a really interesting way to look at it. To be honest, I was taking it for granted that it would completely blow over within a week or so. I feel like the only people who care are people who, to be frank, it had already lost as readers.

I'm going to be on the look out for awareness of the issue spreading outside my echochamber, starting now.

Preference falsification observes that:

A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.

In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.

www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

OP unless you're privy to some internal disquiet or rumours who are knowledgeable about discontent among Scott Trust trustees, I have no expectation of a rapid collapse that can be attributed to the reporting of Wi Spa.

There is absolutely no way that this will kill the Guardian. Hardly anyone will know or care.

No offence, but I think you put far, far too much store by social media. The idea that a few demonised canceled gender critical people criticising the paper on twitter could bring it down is somewhat insane.

Most people don't give a fuck about WiSpa or any of this.

Global warming Afghanistan things at home with supply chain etc. Covid. Loads of stuff.

Most people aren't reading Twitter let alone feminists etc

So no it won't go because of this

No. But you'd hope some of the idiots at the newspaper would fact check more in future

Nothing will change.

Yes, IRL, only a tiny number know or care
And there are plenty of people who never read the editorials and think pieces in the guardian anyway.

I doubt this incident will bring the guardian down. Hopefully it will give them pause for thought and a review of their stance in this general area. I'd rather it re-emerged chastened and engaging sensibly with serious issues. The U.K. needs proper 'mainstream media' on the left to balance eg the Telegraph.

For sure there is a crisis at the Guardian, but finances are assured because of the Scott Trust. How this crisis will resolve itself will only be known when we see how the 'progressive' agenda plays out. There are cracks in the rather flimsy edifice, but not a fatal breach as yet.

However, lets look on the bright side, the Guardian has become a comic for adults. Even the New Statesman must be despairing.

I was a Guardian reader from my teens in the 1980s until the TRA era, and it has made many mistakes before, but back then it seemed like there were enough adults who acted like adults, both writers and behind the scenes, to counterbalance the mistakes and own up to them. They've gone. Now it reads like a student newspaper, a big budget Cherwell.

As for whether its doomed, a business model that alienates thoughtful, safeguarding-concerned adults who pay to subscribe or buy the actual paper copies, while going for the young reader who is used to getting everything free and online doesn't seem very wise. They need to clean out the stables.

The owners can't pull the plug like Murdoch did with News of the World. He owns loads of TV, radio and newspapers so he could take the hit. But Scott Trust might take a grip on the editorial board. Stop commissioning articles by semi literate amateurs maybe. And stop printing opinion as news. Leave that to the Express for gods sake.

They don't have the self awareness to care. They will continue to gaslight and lie, through much bigger scandals than the Spa incident and subsequent demonstrations.

I read somewhere that they’re desperate to keep Owen Jones because he has so many followers.

The awful biased lying reporting of the New Year's Eve assaults in Germany a few years ago barely affected them and this travesty is possibly not quite as bad so i can't see a collapse as imminent.

@Whinginadeville

The awful biased lying reporting of the New Year's Eve assaults in Germany a few years ago barely affected them and this travesty is possibly not quite as bad so i can't see a collapse as imminent.

I think this is worse. If you don't report something that happened in another country, people here don't know it happened. But here, everyone can see that the toilet or changing room in work, at school, in shops, at university, in theatres, all sorts of places are now becoming mixed sex. People are noticing the erasure of the word 'woman'. Everyone I know now knows someone with a teenager who has changed their name and pronouns, prefers their online glitter family to their parents and wants to change sex, so-and-so 'is taking their child to the Tavistock', a name that has has acquired the sort of doom-laden air we used to use for the cancer hospital or the local asylum. Family and friends with school-age children or grandchildren are asking why this isn't all over the TV and radio. Some are saying 'it's like Jimmy Savile or Rotherham all over again'.

@EmpressWitchDoesntBurn

I read somewhere that they’re desperate to keep Owen Jones because he has so many followers.

I think eventually they (or he) will get sued for his defamatory remarks. Like this one in his article on Saturday:

the preposterous row over a man who appeared at a LGBTQ rights protest in Manchester wearing a T-shirt and hat with the logo of the LGB Alliance, an organisation whose main purpose appears to be campaigning against trans rights.

The link in the article goes not to the LGB Alliance website (which would be the best place to find out about their aims), but to a tweet by someone who disagrees with them.

The guardian isn’t going anywhere, it’ll just become more and more of a shadow of its former self living in its own echo chamber & periodically wondering why no one votes Labour anymore

It’s a sneering ‘too cool for school’ joyless nepotistic employment factory for the family & friends of the genuinely privileged

(Tje loathing is mutual though - they manage to get a MN dig into their film review of True Things www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/05/true-things-review-ruth-wilson-and-tom-burkes-erotic-flop#comments )

That film sounds awful and Tom Burke's character sounds like a rehash of the one he played in Joanna Hogg's film.

This current fiasco won't bring The Guardian down.

@AnotherLass

There is absolutely no way that this will kill the Guardian. Hardly anyone will know or care.

No offence, but I think you put far, far too much store by social media. The idea that a few demonised canceled gender critical people criticising the paper on twitter could bring it down is somewhat insane.

This 😂

Nice to see you agree they're demonised NotGCTUR. Unusually truthful of you!

The Guardian is a propaganda rag, and its 'funding' is very secure for the foreseeable future, unfortuantly.
The Guardian does not care what its readers think, certainly not its UK readers anyway.
It exists to make sure middle class people in America dont think too much about things the people who count dont want them to think about, while still feeling relevent and like they know and care about whats important.

The OP isn't completely wrong.

The Guardian has been struggling for several years. Print circulation has dropped massively, and the anticipated advertising bonanza it thought would follow its decision to put all its content for free online never emerged. (Advertising goes mostly to Facebook and Google.)

It now relies very heavily on people voluntarily subscribing - hence all those pleading messages you see on the site. This has worked better than you might expect. Just after the pandemic started, the Guardian's editor and CEO together decided to make some substantial cuts and redundancies because of a drop in income. However, during the pandemic, to everyone's surprise, the number of paid subscribers increased. The CEO disagreed with the editor about whether to make more cuts and lost - she (CEO) has now gone.

But what this means is that the Guardian is very susceptible to the whims and vagaries of its paying audience. If anything causes the number of paid subscribers to drop - a recession, say, or an unpopular editorial line - it will find itself in trouble again. It's possible that the Scott Trust's patience for continuing to subsidise it may eventually run out.

All valid replies.

I wrote that 'if it doesn't sink in the coming week, News of the World-style, it is certainly holed below the waterline' and I think two examples indicate just how much trouble The Guardian is in.

The News of the World closed rapidly, thanks in part to The Guardian, over the Milly Dowler murder hunt. And of course The Sun, which after the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989 couldn't be purchased in most of Merseyside, and even now is a marketing 'dead-zone' for it.

Both instances had an impact on the newspaper in question because its readers suddenly no wanted to be associated with the product. And that is what I reckon The Guardian has managed to do now. Who would willingly want to admit to being a Guardian reader? It will invite the suspicion that, well, the person needs their hard-drive checking. Or in more blunt language, Guardian readers will find themselves purchasing a newspaper that many will associate with its efforts to support white sex offenders in the face of Black victims.

Not really a good look. And not a good look if you are a newspaper which depends on being seen to be virtuous; that the very act of buying The Guardian, or subscribing to it, is in itself a virtuous act, a moral act, an act which places you above the ordinary 'plebs' and advances you to the top of the mountain of moral and ethical probity.

All that though, is now shot-to-pieces, though to be honest, it was getting a bit ragged and ramshackled of late in any case.

Now though, Guardian readers are going to be shackled with the reality that some of those around them might be a little wary of them, might want to edge a way a bit...and certainly won't want to leave their kids with them. All undeserved, but the association has been created...by The Guardian itself.

You don't seem to realise how few people have an issue with trans rights. The vast majority of people want everyone to live and let live, we don't seek to exclude and segregate as you do secular.

@secular111

All valid replies.

I wrote that 'if it doesn't sink in the coming week, News of the World-style, it is certainly holed below the waterline' and I think two examples indicate just how much trouble The Guardian is in.

The News of the World closed rapidly, thanks in part to The Guardian, over the Milly Dowler murder hunt. And of course The Sun, which after the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989 couldn't be purchased in most of Merseyside, and even now is a marketing 'dead-zone' for it.

Both instances had an impact on the newspaper in question because its readers suddenly no wanted to be associated with the product. And that is what I reckon The Guardian has managed to do now. Who would willingly want to admit to being a Guardian reader? It will invite the suspicion that, well, the person needs their hard-drive checking. Or in more blunt language, Guardian readers will find themselves purchasing a newspaper that many will associate with its efforts to support white sex offenders in the face of Black victims.

Not really a good look. And not a good look if you are a newspaper which depends on being seen to be virtuous; that the very act of buying The Guardian, or subscribing to it, is in itself a virtuous act, a moral act, an act which places you above the ordinary 'plebs' and advances you to the top of the mountain of moral and ethical probity.

All that though, is now shot-to-pieces, though to be honest, it was getting a bit ragged and ramshackled of late in any case.

Now though, Guardian readers are going to be shackled with the reality that some of those around them might be a little wary of them, might want to edge a way a bit...and certainly won't want to leave their kids with them. All undeserved, but the association has been created...by The Guardian itself.

I agree with others. You are vastly overestimating the effect this article will have. It's nowhere near comparable to Milly Dowler or Hillsborough.

I gave up on The Guardian 2 or 3 years ago- nothing to do with "gender critical" issues- just generally fed up of its general virtue signalling. I still buy (or more accurately my husband still buys) the print copies on Friday for music and film reviews and Saturday for book reviews and Feast supplement.