Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Yes, you'd have to be a useless fool to write this.

Is this a long-running series from ZW on 'I used to think X ... then I realised Y' ?

google searching "zoe williams I used to.." does bear this out

well the top 2 are I used to tut at people who wear glasses and I used to believe hay fever didn't exist.

The four words any young journalist dreads seeing anywhere near their article. pic.twitter.com/JUv4QsK3O7

— Europe's Leading Soccer Futurologist (@TreborRhurbarb) September 2, 2021

Utterly bizarre feature

Multi-author glossy weekend feature vs tucked in the back pages somewhere. pic.twitter.com/XpeBeeTWU9

— libcom.org (@libcomorg) September 5, 2021

this is the highlighted "culture" article today, was thinking of submitting it for the worst music writing thread

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/05/jailhouse-rock-how-historys-crimes-live-on-in-music

"the punk bank with whom he recorded the song No One Is Innocent"

typo otm

lol duncan campbell is a fairly legendary and deservedly respected crime reporter, fairly evidently a long way out to sea when tasked with mapping pop

(the book he's talking abt looks p interesting tho, i already had my eye on it)

you'd think a seasoned crime writer touching on the subject of crime and murder intersecting with music might have heard of Burzum though

tbh no i would not

(a) he's 77 and (b) he's married to julie christie :0

= he has better things to think abt

and he's a billy bragg fan!

when he was chatting up Julie she thought he was the UB40 singer

has he had relayshuns with girls of many nayshuns i ask myself

it's a shame that none of that "rap" music the young people listen to has ever covered criminal activities

can't lie i had a real soft spot for Billy before he became a Lib Dem

also before he promised not to turn me away even if i was gay

you'd think a seasoned crime writer touching on the subject of crime and murder intersecting with music might have heard of Burzum Pimp C though

Jailhouse Rock is the last word in hard-boiled murder raps tho

George Formby - Leaning On A Motherfucking Lampost

George also did Suck My Blackpool Rock tbfttl

(b) he's married to julie christie :0

Crikey. Book does look v. interesting.

Duncan Campbell has an interesting life. He had a really good TV series in 1994 accompanying his book on The Underworld which I'd like to see again.

He's often confused with the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who has this information on his own website:

Got the right person? This website belongs to the Duncan Campbell that revealed the existance of GCHQ and was one of the founders of UK gay rights pressure-group / charity Stonewall.

Other people with the name Duncan Campbell include a singer in the band UB40, the 2014 UK Turner prize winner, a deceased firebreathing Scottish preacher, and the former crime correspondent, News Editor, and Los Angeles correspondent of the Guardian. You may be looking for the latter, especially if your interest is serious/organised crime - please check his Guardian contributor page. If you wish to reach that other Duncan, then you have not found the right web page.

(This Duncan is NOT married to a famous actress, either. Sorry - you want the Serious Crime guy for that.)

also not to be confused with the not famous at all Duncan Bell, a HG Welles obsessed Cambridge polprof type who probably wouldn't be a good crime reporter

the idea of having to dis-confuse the two duncan campbells that are journalists is a genuine proustian madeleine of the countercultural 80s lol

it probably isn't the reason he married julie christie but it's not NOT the reason

One you contact by PGP key, the other via their literary agent: what a summary of differing fortunes!

Cunts.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/06/the-imagination-fix-10-ways-to-stay-wildly-creative-as-office-life-returns

A section of a Judith Butler interview which connects terfs with the fash was edited out

I preserved it before it disappeared. Just so everyone can be witness to their gross pusillanimity. pic.twitter.com/BgVp9QMzT5

— James 💜 Loxley (@oldnorthroad) September 7, 2021

Completely bizarre.

“ This article was edited on 7 September 2021 to reflect developments which occurred after the interview took place”

developments which occurred

fuck this rag

Excited for Judith Butler's I've-been-cancelled LBC slot

Guardian UK and US is a hell of a conflict.

i just read about the butler thing. are they going to explain the developments? if they were bullied by terfs they should say so but they won't

I’m pretty sure they will issue an explanation given the amount of heat they’re getting and their editorial team’s ongoing need for self-justification.

It's poor and it will be poor

Yes. At a guess, it will be something like ‘now that a criminal charge has resulted from the WiSpa incident, we felt it appropriate to completely redact the question and answer from the interview’, as a fig leaf.

the piece was commission by the Guardian US too which makes this intervention even stranger.

Lots of DMs:

Yes, they deleted a paragraph criticising gender critical feminism

Yes this is confusing, and (I'm told) unprecedented

Yes we asked for it reinstated (or as a last resort, republished)

Yes I offered a rewrite to bring it up-to-date

Yes I'm now going to bed

— Juliana☿ (@socialrepro) September 7, 2021

some details from the interviewer

I hadn't realised the British staff would have final veto power, tbh.

— Juliana☿ (@socialrepro) September 8, 2021

& confirmed that the uk guardian staff intervened which seems very unusual for a us guardian article? will be maddening if the uk branch starts intervening in the au guardian too which is somehow very good generally

Their processes are fucked.

the uk parent has also reportedly used this as a pretext to force the us guardian to scrap an entire (presumably trans-friendly seeing as it was the us guardian) series on trans issues of which this interview was intended to be the first part

hope there's some sort of pushback from the us staff or something

this really seems like unspoken toxic working culture / prejudice crossing over into explicit policy, not something that ever really ends well

The idea humans don't need sex categories, that we're above such mundanities, is the ultimate luxury belief.
And it unsurprisingly emerged from an elite university in a superpower state https://t.co/cZhcM2YKZc

— Susanna Rustin (@SusannaRustin) September 7, 2021

*Checks bio* ok

🚨 Facts are sacred 🚨

Pretty edifying watching soi disant feminists who'd rather tear down feminist and gender theory than give up hating all trans people

luxury belief

Oh so now religious fundamentalists are bad? Because swerfs and terfs usually have no problem aligning with the Christians ones.

now that it's established that the other branches don't actually have editorial independence i'm really looking forward to "are the guardian us & au worse than they used to be" slowly becoming increasingly common

in the decades since this thread started the guardian kowtowed to the MI5 in a fashion that made the Murdoch papers look like slackers. Aligned themselves with the transphobes and expended industrial amounts of energy attacking Corbynism. We need to stop helping keep them alive by giving them reluctant hate clicks and treat them as nothing different different from the spectator or the telegraph going forwards. They need to die.