The Guardian

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"The KGB loved The Guardian. It was deemed highly susceptible to penetration."~ KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky

As Watergate is to the Washington Post, and thalidomide to the Sunday Times, so phone-hacking will surely be to the Guardian: a defining moment in its history.~ The Economist

The Guardian / The Observer is a centre-lefty broadsheet quite popular with centre-lefty loliticians despite its reputation for typos. (Which isn't quite as bad as is usually described, but still used for laughs by Private Eye.) Most serious news links you find on the comm will be from the website of this paper, partly due to its popularity, and partly because it hasn't locked down its site to anyone except subscribers like, say, The Times has.

History[edit | edit source]

Early Years[edit | edit source]

The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 by John Edward Taylor when the police shut his old newspaper down. The first edition was published on 5 May 1921. It went through a series of mergers and splits in its early years but was known (generally) as The Manchester Guardian until 1959 which it became The Guardian.

In its early years the paper was hostile to inductrial action and meh on American Presidents that everyone else loved, so not a lot has really changed.

CP Scott[edit | edit source]

CP Scott, a journalist and Liberal politician, became editor in 1872 and remained in post for57 years. Under his editorial leadership, the paper gradually became more radical rather than centrist, backing campaigns such as women's suffrage, the campaign against the Boer War and trying to get William Gladstone elected. He was also instrumental in ensuring the newspaper covered the deepening and worsening issues in Ireland, particularly in the form of pictures and drawings.

20th Century[edit | edit source]

This period saw the paper and its politics slip back centrally first on issues like the NHS (and also for some reason really, really hating Nye Bevan) to believing the British government over Bloody Sunday and handing over confidential information leaked to the paper by civil servants about controversial defense issues.

Ownership and Finances[edit | edit source]

Unlike most other newspapers, The Guardian was owned by a trust which was a registered charity rather than by a company or an individual/group of individuals. This changed in 2008 but the company in charge does basically the same thing the charity used to do. It is the only paper that conducts a social, ethical an environmental audit.

The paper consistently makes a loss and so is really, really reliant on the other profit making elements of the Guardian Media Group[1].

The website has a 3-tier "membership" service so people who don't pay can still access the content but people who want to support the paper can.

By December 2016, the paper's readership stood at about 161,000.

Scandals[edit | edit source]

KGB Sleeper Agent[edit | edit source]

In 1994 it was alleged the literary editor of the paper was "an agent of influence". Although the editor denied the accusations, he resigned anyway.

Libel Cases[edit | edit source]

Then Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken sued the paper for libel after it published claims that Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed had paid for Aitken and his wife to stay at The Ritz. Aitken claimed that his wife had paid for the room, but The Guardian presented evidence at court to the contrary. Aitken was later jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

The Phone-hacking Scandal[edit | edit source]

For full details please see the Phone Hacking Scandal

The Guardian was the first paper to publish investigations into the use of phone hacking by the News of the World in 2009.

Antisemitism[edit | edit source]

Because the paper skews the way it does, it tends to attract a certain sort of person both in its readership and in its contributors. Since the election of Jeremy Corbyn this has been exacerbated. Some of these people tend to be pretty antisemitic in the middle-England hand-wringing sort of way rather than the Nick Griffin sort of way.

Edward Snowden[edit | edit source]

In June 2013 the paper was leaked details about the Obama administration's surveillance programs by Edward Snowden and wrote some stories about it. David Cameron and Nick Clegg then[2] ordered the Cabinet Secretary to in turn order the paper to destroy all traces of the information, and officers of GCHQ oversaw the destruction of the hard-drives. This earnt the newspaper a lot of critics - some for the fact that it published anything at all, and some because the paper didn't publish enough.

Politics[edit | edit source]

As detailed above, it is the only paper that conducts a social, ethical an environmental audit. That should explain it.

In 2010 it backed the Liberal Democrats and advocated tactical voting in order to stop a Conservative victory. In 2015 the paper backed Labour.

In the 2015 Labour leadership elections following Ed Miliband's resignation, the paper backed Yvette Cooper, although key contributors like Owen Jones and Seumas Milne backed Jeremy Corbyn.

Importance in Fandom[edit | edit source]

Contributors[edit | edit source]

Owen Jones has a regular column where he can't make up his mind whether he loves or hates Jeremy Corbyn and/or the wider Labour Party.

To its credit, it contains a few articles written by Nick Clegg before anyone knew who he was, Charlie Brooker (a comedian and TV critic who is popular with Lolitics members, even if his anon meme is just as entrancing as ours, but isn't lolitics related so nothing else will be said of him), and Steve Bell's hallucinatory lolitical cartoons.

The Graun provides handy one-stop pages where you can read all Nick's articles (laugh at the irony as he disses David Cameron and the thought of joining forces with him months before the election, thrill to the intellectual might of a man whose idea of fun in the middle of election campaigning is to take time out to write a paen to Samuel Beckett) and all David Cameron's articles which start from the days of his candidacy as an MP. Why an up-and-coming young Conservative MP decided to confide to a left-wing rag his worst moments when standing for MP (a dead dog was involved), his first encounter with Tony Blair ("Palms running with sweat. Throat dry. Chest pounding with anticipation. I had waited for this moment for more than a decade"), "losing his virginity" in the House of Commons, and talking sex with Ann Widdicombe is anyone's guess, but it's clear that Lolitics' gain was witty banter's loss because he becomes more boring (sorry, mature) with every rung he climbs up the greasy pole of power.

Shipping[edit | edit source]

The Guardian is an inveterate politician shipper. Not only does it play host to the fevered imaginings of Steve Bell, and not only did it photoshop this cover for its weekly G2 supplement:

The Guardian ships TBGB like mad

It actually went so far as to set up politicians on blind dates.

Ordinary loliticians can only watch and dream, but if you are a major national newspaper you can try to make your insane RPF ships a reality.

References[edit | edit source]

  1. I suppose those things must technically exist even if no one has any idea what they are
  2. allegedly