Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

What a terrible, terrible thing. Cohen was my prophet & guru, I never disagreed with him about anything.

— Charles Polák (@CharlesPolak) July 13, 2022

I don't know about this case but Tracer Hand's post is very good.

Lots of malicious, irrelevant garbage was printed about "Labour's complaints procedure", so it's noteworthy that some of the people who printed it don't have a working complaints procedure.

This cunt is posting through it, so far.

Incidentally Braverman didn't "specialise in immigration law". She was a jobbing barrister who spent most of her career dealing with the licensing of pubs and clubs. https://t.co/uTbAHh9xSR

— Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) July 14, 2022

Compare and contrast.

Have been thinking this - the ‘GC feminists’ spitting with accusations of misogynist, bully, woman-hater, inc Suzanne Moore who tried to ‘expose’ him with an ancient and innocuous DM he sent her once that made *her* look bad - he was being nice to her lol. All radio silence now. https://t.co/CjST2sbgQo

— Fisun Guner 🇵🇸🍉 (@FisunGuner) July 15, 2022

When I worked at a large govt organisation the complaints procedure was explicit that if you raised a grievance, you would never know ,through official channels, the nature of the outcome.

The purpose of the complaints process was very clearly to protect the organisation at all times, particularly from reputational risk, and to try to ensure complaints never reached a tribunal. The process wasn’t there to serve the complainant.

I worked in the Guardian HR department, albeit over a decade ago, and they were basically just the team for recruitment, restructures and redundancies, no particular interest in staff wellbeing, combative relationship with union, etc. They were the an team at the Guardian, not an HR team with "Guardian values" whatever that means. I certainly heard lots of unpleasant stories about NC swearing, yelling at workies and low-rung staff members, turning up drunk etc, abuse presumably tolerated as salty old-school behaviour

Typo: *They were an HR team at the Guardian, not...

Doesn't sound like they practice what they are preaching on their pages.

Same goes with Verso, which only after a fierce battle have finally recognised their union.

Who'd've thocht it?

the Verso situation was a bit of a shocker for me when i first read about it. the Graun, not so much.

I forgot the real kicker in that complaints process… The moment you engage with it, HR claimed you are bound by govt rules so that to speak of the issue in any open way was a breach of your employment and you could be dismissed!

It was basically a way of keeping people silent.

And if I were a multimillionaire I would set up an alternative charitable fund that govt employees could use to take legal action in their workplace and completely bypass the useless grievance process.

What does the Guardian recommend for keeping cool in the hot weather, I wonder?
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jul/15/how-and-where-to-enjoy-open-water-swimming-safely-heatwave

lol

tbf drowning under a layer of toxic blue-green algae in sewage polluted water is much preferable to cooking food when it's 38°

Looks like they have give Nick the month off.

Nick Cohen Observer articles usually drop around 7pm... nothing as yet this week, but also still no comment from either him or Observer. Hope they're not just giving him a month's holiday as they did during metoo. deserves the full Rupert Myers @guardian @paulfwebster @nickcohen4

— italian keir starmer (@wariotifo) July 16, 2022

This needs to go to court.

I've got nothing but hero worship for the work wariotifo has put in to expose this piece of garbage.

michael white was with them for 45 years and were cohenesque stories about him while he was still working there- unlike cohen he even acknowledged it in a just a bit of fun sort of way - they knew about this if I did and there is going to be plenty more they know about that I don't

Today in the Observer New Review:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/17/alastair-campbell-tory-leadership-truss-rest-is-politics-podcast-interview

Extraordinary, really.

"Alastair Campbell is a writer, broadcaster and mental-health activist best known for his role as former prime minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy, and for his bestselling eight-volume series of diaries about the Blair years. He recently teamed up with former Conservative cabinet minister Rory Stewart to launch an odd-couple current affairs podcast, The Rest Is Politics, and is filming a new reality TV show for Channel 4, Make Me Prime Minister, which he will host with Sayeeda Warsi, the former Conservative party co-chair."

"odd-couple"

got to find something for the sensible tories to do, they've got no chance of front bench action in the Conservative party and the only other place they'd fit in would be in Starmer's shadow cabinet.

Stewart and Warsi are both to the left of Campbell?

Maybe an odd couple in that sense.

Campbell is the only one who doesn't speak Urdu.

He's from Burnley, he speaks 'ow do.

I've worked in Burnley before and never met anyone who speaks with a Campbell accent.

Turns out he's actually from Yorkshire!

ffs!

I know someone whose wife is doing some architecture work for him. His partner is very nice. That's all the gossip I've got.

ffs!

My friend Esther is very active in Holborn and St Pancras CLP and the Campbell/Millar house has been the site of a few parties. Their guest loo is wallpapered in tabloid splashes about AC.

fws!

looking forward to Make Me A War Criminal

lock the doors

Important update on the Guardian heatwave liveblog by @rachela_hall. https://t.co/p22P5Kj8ve pic.twitter.com/nCklGA1Lnq

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) July 18, 2022

cunt writes for cunts about cunts, delighting cunts

‘Conservatives are so irredeemably split they removed Boris Johnson only to find they could not unite behind a replacement…’

✍️ Nick Cohenhttps://t.co/OdgRgS2iBq

— The Spectator (@spectator) July 18, 2022

really trying his damndest to carry on calmly posting as he usually does after his position should be untenable at this fucking point.

(xp) Stunning insights from the vile sex pest there.

great to see the media establishment straining every sinew to maintain omerta around a serial harasser and bully who doesn't even know how to spell straitjacket

On Novara but I'll put it here. They are expanding.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/novara-media-donors/

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/25/tim-westwood-faced-bullying-allegation-inside-bbc-while-radio-1-dj

It's really bad when a large media organisation suppresses serious whistleblowing accusations. Now, let's have a look and see who's in this week's opinion pages...

This is what one Guardian comms ed is getting up to on twitter:

If this isn't exaggerating and weaponising antisemitism against the left, I don't know what is.

Unsurprisingly, @SiamGoorwich works for the Guardian. This is standard practice at that right-wing-pretending-to-be-left-wing rag. pic.twitter.com/ep1MBasv83

— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@WarmongerHodges) July 25, 2022

After tweeting about Nick Cohen and Guardian News and Media (GNM’s) attempts to discourage complaints from W1 and W2, I received a number of messages from other women wanting to talk about how life is at GNM. 🧵

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) July 28, 2022

This was funny.

1/ If silly people could just stop writing silly things about things they've only done confirmation bias google searches on, the rest of us would have a lot more time to watch Stranger Things.

Alas.

Let's go paragraph by paragraph. pic.twitter.com/yBBMDMRgfL

— Dmitry Grozoubinski (@DmitryOpines) July 29, 2022

Jenkins is never afraid to pie himself in the face

Really good thing about twitter is how there is a rebuttal to any single piece of nonsense published on the day.

lol, that was a very thorough rinsing. If they had a reputation to protect they'd nuke the article.

I found it interesting that just after the invasion of Ukraine the newspaper published several pieces by Simon Jenkins about the war - along the lines of "NATO's aggression has backfired / we must lift sanctions on Russia" - and then he seemed to lose interest in the topic. I remember wondering if the editor had told him to knock it off. Or if the editor was sick of him writing essentially the same piece over and over again.

For example all but two of his columns from March were about the war, and one of the other stories was about the uselessness of sanctions (albeit against Iran):
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/simonjenkins?page=2

But in April he only wrote two stories on the topic, and none at all in May, two in June, one in July. And most of them are really about domestic politics, only tangentially Ukraine.

When I saw "he wrote" I don't know how the editorial process works with opinion columnists in a national newspaper. Perhaps he wrote lots of pieces that were rejected, or perhaps the editor gave him a list of topics to cover. I just don't know. But it seems odd that with the war raging he decided not to cover it.

jenkins has been staunchly anti-interventionist for a long time which has made him right by default on foreign policy a lot of the time and i used to rate him for that but it’s become increasingly clear that he very often just doesn’t know wtf he’s talking about

Thank you @pressgazette for breaking an industry silence on this and for including some points from me. It's good to talk as BT used to say. https://t.co/oMiP3Fs3Fa

— lucy siegle (@lucysiegle) August 2, 2022

bravo to GMG for such a fast response

hey it's not like there's over a decade of reports on this scumbag's behaviour