Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/nov/21/night-blackpool-broadway-hotel-tripadvisor

No worries though, it was buried in a full page report on p5 of the main news section.

Does anyone else get strange things happening when they open the home page in Safari? The pictures are often under the wrong stories. It's great!

http://i.imgur.com/mHoT0NZ.jpg

he may be understood but at least he has one friend

i get the same thing, it's one of the few joys in looking at the news each morning

That's brilliant

further indignity heaped on poor old Gordon as well

So the NME did an uncharacteristically excellent feature on the UK DIY music scene a few weeks ago. Lots of great bands and promoters featured, individual locales got well observed and excellently researched coverage, a few of the bands covered have been going on for a decade or more with nary a mention in any nationwide press. It was a moment to savour for those of us who have any pride or involvement in UK DIY.

So it's good that The Guardian saw fit to do the same, you'd think? Well, it would've been, if they didn't just effectively reprint the same bands/venues/promoters/info/towns, without acknowledging or giving credit to the relevant journalists, in fact you'd think Gwilym Mumford had done all the work himself. Pretty fucking shoddy, Guardian. Why not give the (excellent) writers behind the piece some work, or at least some credit.

link?

n/m I found it

That's 13 years now the Guardian has been, if you will, 'worse than it used to be'.

It was still a pile of wank in the Manchester Guardian years, it is a faulty premise for a thread title.

Are you suggesting that a pile of wank is the worst the universe has to offer?

Was just reading a WW1 book and read how similarly appallingly full of shit/gung ho the MG was to the right wing press at the time. Albeit one written by a loathsome prick who writes for the Telegraph!

Carl Fogarty wins I’m A Celebrity
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this is one of the 12 most important stories apparently

the manchester guardian was more sceptical of the case for war than the conservative press press prior to and during the july crisis

The Manchester Guardian declared that Britain was in no danger of being dragged into the Austro-Serbian conflict by ‘treaties of alliance’ and famously announced that Manchester cared for Belgrade as little as Belgrade cared for Manchester.

then the war started

the observer of course supported the 2003 iraq war

I can't the find the offending quote from the Max Hastings book by the MG after a search, so I am probably talking shite!

"I write for the Guardian," said Sir Max Hastings in 2005, "because it is read by the new establishment"

I had a few WW1 books on the go simultaneously recently is my excuse!

no i am sure you're right about the liberal papers during the war, once it started there was a strong level of unanimity and the differences prior to it were erased but even some of the conservative papers were sceptical until the declaration of war

that quote from the excellent 'the sleepwalkers' by christopher clark

Enjoying the Guardian's Will And Kate coverage and how it's stretching journalists:

The evening crescendoed with the long-speculated meeting between Beyonce and Jay-Z and Kate and William midway through the third quarter.

xp (and a bit of topic) The Sleepwalkers is excellent, apart from the title, which seems inappropriate. IMO Clark shows that the protagonists did anything but sleepwalk into the conflict (though the fact that all the senior figures involved were apparently suffering from heart disease/strokes/epilepsy, insomniacs, workaholics, neurotics, alcoholics, or some combination of these wasn't a great help)

the title is perfectly appropriate and given his quotations from musil, schweig, roth etc is almost certainly an allusion to the novel by hermann broch

According to Broch, “sleepwalkers” refer to a gap between the death of an ethical system and the birth of another, as much as a somnambulist finds himself in a state between sleep and awake

this is attested to throughout the book, the transition from the bismarck archetype and the measured realpolitik of the 19th c with its delicate multipolar settlement towards a bloc identity that was more paranoid, brittle and reactive in which the incipient demise of the ottoman and then austrian empires a sort of fait accompli

*zweig*

interesting, thanks, I hadn't appreciated this

also he explains his choice of title in the very last sentence of the book - "...the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”

that's what sits less well with me, the idea the protagonists were "unseeing". I think a lot of accusations can be leveled at them, but that's not one of them. Anyway these are quibbles, it's a great book.

Alan R to step down as editor next year, after 20 years.

Eagerly anticipating the sacking of every frivolous lifestyle columnist and the Guardian's impending return to golden age ERM-era severity.

Pretty sure I'll get the big job, on a platform of more Adel Taarabt and more Hold Steady.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/dec/10/most-expensive-photograph-ever-hackneyed-tasteless

Photography is not an art. It is a technology. We have no excuse to ignore this obvious fact in the age of digital cameras, when the most beguiling high-definition images and effects are available to millions. My iPad can take panoramic views that are gorgeous to look at. Does that make me an artist? No, it just makes my tablet one hell of a device.

what a Hot Take!

Challop is free

hey i did not expect this thread to make me feel better about my arbitrary purchase of the sleepwalkers the other day but it has so theres that

I bought the broch sleepwalkers the other day as it happens but it was for a gift

The Sleepwalkers really is excellent.

My library stock a copy of The Sleepwalkers because of me :-)

I thought Clark's book alluded to the novel. xp

I couldn't get through The Sleepwalkers. I must be stupid.

The novel is ok-ish. Loved some of the last part but when I tried to re-read the first part it was a tad mundane.

Garcia opened investigations into the conduct of five individuals during the bidding process including three current executive committee members – √Ångel Mar√-a Villar Llona of Spain, Belgium’s Michel D’Hooghe and Thailand’s Wowari Makudi

http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/12/19/1419018001125/2b8d711f-ee90-405b-bbb8-92034cd9aee9-620x372.jpeg

What we’ve learned from a year in webchats …
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to return to ww1, the guardian helpfully publishes a shit article by congenital moron and prison rape apologist michael white about why someone who died 16 years before it began is, actually, to blame

http://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2014/dec/31/bismarck-escaped-blame-first-world-war

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/04/is-your-five-year-old-bigot-racist

Was a very sensible article, I thought.

yeah, it really is. did you read beyond the headline, neil?

This jumped out at me:

But isn’t the most likely explanation that they heard these choice phrases from the adults around them

Possibly. But it seems at least equally likely that they learned them from other children, who in turn learned them from other children, in a chain that eventually stretches back to an adult some time in the dim past.

I say this because schoolyards have an oral tradition and a culture which is preserved by kids and is passed on from kid to kid. That oral tradition contains a lot more than rope-skipping rhymes. It includes taunts and a lot of similar ugly stuff. The major criterion for a taunt to survive and thrive on a playground is that it is effective; it hurts; it belittles; it is a weapon that cuts the taunted kid in a tender spot. Racist taunts fit that criterion very well.

But it doesn't really matter how or from whom the racist taunts are learned, because the point is for the adults to teach the kids to stop using them, even though the kids obviously know them and know how to use them. That's just SOP for any responsible elementary school teacher.

guilty as charged, didn't get past the clickbait title and URL

now I've read it, it's fair enough I suppose

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/31/david-duke-former-ku-klux-klan-leader-steve-scalise

Guardia also had this David Duke interview, which annoyed me a bit. Aw, he regrets having been a Grand Dragon in the Klan. They're taking him at his word. As if he's somehow better now.

Still if you're not from the US you can learn about David Duke.

Read between the lines and there's no way they're taking him at his word. It's a deadpan give-em-enough-rope interview with lots of damning quotes from Lawrence Powell. You don't need the writer to step in and say "BTW I think he's a racist" to get the message.

Is it a good idea for the Guardian to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muhammad on their website right now?