No mention of your support for the invasion of Iraq then?

This is a nice one: “It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.” I think the quality of predictions in geo-politics or economics hasn't improved much since then.

The Guardian has in 200 years only won one Pulitzer, for Glenn Greenwald's reporting on intelligence agency wiretapping and other malfeasance. And what does the Guardian do? They repeatedly malign Greenwald and publish falsehoods about him. See this thread for a typical example: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1388826988736126976

The problem isn't just that the Guardian gets major stuff wrong, and that they don't -- as a matter of course -- acknowledge mistakes. The big, no huge, problem is that they do almost no real journalism whatsoever.

(I can also pick nits about this article that getting global cooling wrong and asbestos doesn't mean anything because those were mundane mistakes that are not indicative of a larger problem, but I'd rather focus on the big picture that The Guardian doesn't do real journalism and the big things they get wrong as a consequence they never acknowledge, not even in articles like these.)

edit: bonus link about how the Guardian silences and fires journalists who tweet sarcastically about sensitive topics. Thread: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1359544245238005760

Can we have all newspapers do this?

I imagine few would be as honest as this

Ah, the eternal question. How do you respond to this? Applaud and encourage even more thorough self-reflection, or criticize because the self-reflection was not thorough enough?

Guardian's "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies" Documentary: Guardian hacks continue PR war against WikiLeaks

wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html

By The Guardian.

No mention of Nazi Germany, I'm curious to know what their position was. My understanding is that The Times was very sympathetic to Hitler's claims of not having bad intent regarding Czechoslovakia and regularly railed against the government for not giving their support

> Fear of the mob dominated

Ironic, considering the apologetic tone of the article overall...

The left wing film director Lindsay Anderson who directed the movie "If..." starring Malcolm McDowell about an uprising in a British public school was asked why he didn't read The Guardian but the right wing Telegraph newspaper. He replied by saying that it was easier to spot the lies...

Personally I think the Guardian deserves support as the only real opposition or left newspaper in the UK. It's really flawed and the lies are harder to see but it fulfils an essential role in society.

In my view, it was only one.

This seems like an act of penance by The Guardian.

More recently: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-m...

It is striking that the mainstream positions today would have been considered radical leftism at most points in the past.

If the same pattern holds, then radical leftist positions of today will be again the mainstream positions in the future.

The lag time has been considerable though. I think even into the 90’s the guardian would not have approved of the suffragette’s direct action methods.

In some ways though things have stagnated for almost a century; Bernie Sanders public health care plan is something that was being pushed for a century ago, and the forces of private capital have managed to hold back the tide for a hundred years.

So it might be that my prediction that the radical left of today is the mainstream of tomorrow is totally wrong, and things could actually regress.

A rather strange article. In some ways quite perceptive and reflective, but in other ways the opposite.

One of the first examples is a little odd.

errors of scientific understanding resulted in a 1927 article that promoted the virtues of asbestos

It's a bit unclear what "errors of scientific understanding" means here, but in context this makes it sound like the Guardian writers mis-understood scientists who were warning about the dangers of asbestos. The report presented to Parliament about the dangers of asbestos didn't arrive until 1930 and before that there was only a single known case of asbestosis in the UK, so that seems to deflect attention from the fact that the errors - if you want to call a lack of knowledge an error - were by scientists, not the Guardian writers.

Towards the end we have this:

"Since then, referendums have become, much to the paper’s displeasure, an established part of our constitution, used as a way to stamp democratic legitimacy on to controversial ideas and as a tool of party management"

Perhaps one day they'll be writing a similar backwards-looking piece apologizing for having held this view too. At the start they rail against the paper's former imperialism and feelings of superiority, then claim that referendums are a problem because they legitimize "controversial ideas". This from a paper which delights in publishing controversial and extreme ideas:

https://twitter.com/somuchguardian?lang=en

A few select headlines:

"The tears of joy emoji is the worst of all - it's used to gloat about human suffering"

"Brexit will spell the end of British art as we know it"

"Can male writers avoid misogyny?"

"What if we're living in a computer simulation?"

"Robots are racist and sexist"

etc. Perhaps some of these will make future lists.

Given that the Pulitzers are only given for work that appears in a US publication, that's not terribly surprising. And saying that the Guardian 'doesn't do real journalism' is fundamentally unserious. I have huge problems with their editorial decision-making, and their attitudes to a number of issues I know about and care deeply about. But they are a serious newspaper, doing far better journalism than the vast majority of other papers. In the UK they are one of only a few still making even a pretence of being proper journalists. The fact that they are as reluctant as anyone else to issue mea culpas, and have decided that Greenwald is a crank, doesn't change that.

How absurd, a 200 year old British paper only winning one American award that was only founded in the 20th century.

This is interesting. I would have said the opposite.

My opinion was that the Guardian is only worthwhile because it occasionally does some very good journalism, and that just about outweighs the pointless bullshit.

I don't really have anything to back that up though, just a general impression from reading it. So it's interesting to hear some evidence to the contrary. I have no idea if the Pulitzer is actually a good measure though.

A point of comparison: look at the Economist, which does basically no investigative journalism, but does produce fairly sensible opinion pieces (of course from a particular viewpoint, often a bit limited in their vision).

My impression of Glenn Greenwald is that he is either paranoid, or willing to stoke his readers' paranoia in order to attract attention.

This seems like standard behavior for Greenwald: https://twitter.com/themattdimitri/status/138969371391236917... It's the same refrain as always: 'everyone is out to get me!'

Who does real journalism in your opinion? BBC ? NYT ? What's focused on facts these days and not on opinions anc clickbait ?

I imagine many would be, so long as sufficient time had passed. If you’re apologising for a 20 year old mistake, the person who made that mistake probably left the newspaper a while ago. You don’t have to interact awkwardly with them. Nor are they in a position of power from where they can prevent the apology from being printed.

The NYT once published a hilarious apology 49 years after they made a mistake. The original author was long gone by then.

> A Correction: On Jan. 13, 1920, "Topics of the Times," an editorial-page feature of The New York Times, dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum and commented on the ideas of Robert H. Goddard, the rocket pioneer, as follows:

> 'That Professor Goddard with his 'chair' in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

> Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

The only exception I’m aware of personally is the Economist consistently apologising for supporting the Iraq war in the 2000s, and continuing to do so every time the decision to enter the war is mentioned. This from 2018, 15 years after the war started

> Iraq, in other words, is doing well. Some will argue that this justifies America’s invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein (which we supported). It does not. Too much blood was shed along the way in Iraq and elsewhere. (https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/28/fifteen-years-a...)

I am constantly seeing references in The Economist to things they've changed their mind about. Often the wording is something like this: It was often claimed (including by this newspapers) that ... However, ...

The KC Star apologized for its past racist coverage last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949271163/the-kc-star-apologi...

Even this seems pretty dishonest, when all the entries are from before the time when many of the Guardian's current staff were not alive.

You will notice that the errors they chose to list are ones that accentuate their current political agenda.

It is therefore not self-reflection at all. It is merely doubling down on existing dogma by recasting contradictory prior politics as "wrong".

It actually highlights exactly what's wrong with "journalism". The Guardian doesn't report, it advocates.

It intentionally provides biased views in order to sway readers - the exact opposite of what I'm looking for in a news outlet.

I want news that has LOTS of contradictory points of views. One that presents facts without opinion, and strives to relate events without an agenda.

The Guardian is a failure of journalism. If you are not paying for news media, you are the product, not the consumer.

Call me cynical, but this report was commissioned back in July of last year. Releasing it today, when it's guaranteed to be eclipsed by dramatic local and by-election results here in the UK, has a bit of an odour to it.

(The report has had some attention from the influential political muckraking blog Order Order over the past few days, which is probably why they didn't feel they could sit on it any longer.)

You can be sure that the rightwing press aren't engaging in this kind of reflection, however flawed. You aren't going to see "what went wrong at the News Of The World that led to its collapse" or "the Sun apologizes for its Hillsborough coverage" or "why the Times published a climate change denialist for years" or "has the Spectator engaged in systemic racism".

More people should pay attention to Hugh Grant and his Hacked Off campaign about the abuses of the mainstream media in the UK.

Is it an eternal question? Because I have a hard time finding examples where cynicism is the better course of action than pragmatic encouragement.