Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

yes. she also says 'those of us on this side of the pond' which I think Mark S banned a long time ago

She makes a very valid point about Lauren's deployment versus her experience on 10 O'Clock - the 'hawt blonde sidekick OTMing the nerds' space she currently fills there needs fixing, STAT.

My suggestions for fixing The 10 O'Clock Show mostly involve a rocket and the sun.

good call

Oh dear...

Guardian media commentator Roy Greenslade gave it to The Sun with both barrels this morning over its “failure” to run the news that Sky sports pundits Richard Keys and Andy Gray had been axed in a row over off-air sexist comments.

“…the editor, Dominic Mohan, got it hopelessly wrong. By ignoring the story, he tends to prove the theory that Murdoch’s papers dance to Murdoch’s tune.”

Axegrinder understands that there was much hilarity at Wapping when perplexed hacks realised that Roy must have been reading an Irish edition of The Sun which was missing the Sky Sports tale. Sun readers elsewhere will have seen that the story was in fact splashed across pages one, four and five.

Roy’s misfiring blog post disappeared shortly after the mishap was pointed out. But it has not disappeared from the internet completely, you can see a version of it here.

"Get 'Em Off" was the Sun headline, I believe

has anyone ever described a man as "whip-smart"? also who is the "we" that barton refers to.

btw have we had a thread about that awful show yet? i can't think of a worse example of "omg ur soooo right, u should be president, i agree with u cos it makes me smart" bullshit than putting brooker and mitchell on a c4 show.

It's on a thread about the 11 o'clock show, I think.

has anyone ever described a man as "whip-smart"?

HA. Henry Root used to make the same running observation about the use of "corrosively intelligent" which only applies to actresses apparently.

in a way it is worse for The Sun to hypocritically decry sexism. in a way.

pretty funny given what barton's saying in the piece, "whip-smart" is such a cutesy twee term. why wouldn't you just say "smart"? why "whip-smart"? if you wanted to call someone smart you'd say they're smart.

It has a head-patting ring to it, yeah, like you'd tell a 10 year-old they're "whip smart" and then give them a shiny 50p coin.

yeah exactly, you'd use it talking about a precocious child or something.

http://drinksbyjohn.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/wert.jpg

http://www.fti.asn.au/blogs/production-support-report/juno.jpg

i think it's ok to say 'whip-smart'

and like, yeah it's on the 'front page' of the internet but way far down and laura barton is one of their main writers. the big headline they have up is about a pay-channel football commentator getting the sack, so, you know...

Axegrinder understands that there was much hilarity at Wapping when perplexed hacks realised that Roy must have been reading an Irish edition of The Sun which was missing the Sky Sports tale. Sun readers elsewhere will have seen that the story was in fact splashed across pages one, four and five.

Roy’s misfiring blog post disappeared shortly after the mishap was pointed out. But it has not disappeared from the internet completely, you can see a version of it here.

also most of this stuff has been leaked by sky news.

andy gray is one of the potential litigants in the notw phone hacking thing. cynical, or just being honest?

For all the celebrity bollocks they go on for, the Guardian could now realistically claim to be the best newspaper in the anglophone world. Which means, of course, the world.

least worst

least worst might be right, but still.

Usually, the media would be going "this is going too far, no-one can compliment a woman now for fear of getting sacked", but ooh, it's Murdoch effectively doing the sacking, so....

apparently mMurdoch is also now NEGOTIATING with government about whether he gets his Sky deal.

not, government is going to make a ruling which will then be followed - but, government is going to NEGOTIATE outcome with Murdoch.

So it's "um, if we say no, can we still be pals?"

Murdoch's support couldn't even buy them an election victory, don't see why they're obliged to bend over for him.

I'm shocked by how old Murdoch looks now. He's lost so much hair that he's finally had "the haircut".

I'm wondering what's going to happen when he dies, whether the country and its media and politics will get better or whether the army of mini-Murdochs is too entrenched now. He does seem to wield an enormous amount of personal power that I can't quite see anyone else replicating.

Think someone needs to incept James Murdoch.

Even looks like Saito:

http://img.ibtimes.com/www/data/images/full/2011/01/25/60896-rupert-murdoch-chairman-and-chief-executive-of.jpg

Osama Hamdan is head of the Hamas international relations department

yeah, about that... kind of amazing rly

presumably he was bumped up from the Hamas home electronics department (2nd floor)

really surprised noone wanted to talk about the graun giving hamas their own op-ed column

oh wait

do despair with the guardian sometimes. saw one of their writers on the bbc politics show on sun discussing the great cameron speech and she basically agreed more or less perfectly with the guy from the sun. what was the point?

Was it Julian Glover?

i don't 'get' that guy and his hilarious little lord fauntleroy byline pic being in the guardian alongside seamus milne. reminds me of the independent, incoherence-wise.

Is he any relation to, errrrr, Julian Glover?

Even the Mail employs a token leftie or two so I assume he's the Guardian's designated coalition cheerleader in the interests of balance. Still aggravating though, because he tends to appear as the man from the Guardian rather than an outlying columnist.

nothing is as egregious as the indy's continued employment of bruce anderson

Glover is civil partnered with Matthew Parris, of course. So I wouldn't expect a massive philosophical divergence.

This Giddens fellow must be regretting writing this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/09/comment.libya

Piece is some pretty boneheaded stuff even w/o taking "current events" into account.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/26/darin-strauss-car-crash-kira-cochrane

obv a v tragic event for the writer, but like...who commissioned this? it really is a long winded and conceptually weird article. load of rubbish.

i worry about how classist i am sometimes. i stopped reading when i got to "gleave".

i mean i am middle-class, but i'm from the west of scotland, my da was a refugee, we were poor when i was a wean, etc. fucking "gleave".

tibalt.

like if she met the guy whose car hit her brother, then that'd be one thing. but as it is it's like the author is kinda offering basic human consolation which anyone really could put forward.

also...doing 40mph in a 30mph zone and hitting a child who was on the side of the road at dusk is more in the realms of tragic rather than heinous. it's not like he was drunk or something.

i managed to finish it and aye, it's a horror.

what a fucking mess.

XP Giddens' articles are generally interesting in that they're almost always in line with the positions taken by Tony Blair, whether those positions are articulated in public or not. It does sound like he genuinely believed that Libya was on the path to reform - i wonder whether Blair shared that view.