The Guardian

The Guardian is a British newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. It is published Monday to Saturday in the Berliner format. Until 1959 it was called The Manchester Guardian, reflecting its provincial origins; the paper is still occasionally referred to by this name, especially in North America (to distinguish it from other newspapers with similar names), although it has been based in London since 1964 (with printing facilities in both Manchester and London).

History

The Guardian's Newsroom visitor centre and archive (No 60), with an old sign with the name The Manchester Guardian

The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by a group of non-conformist businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor. The prospectus which announced the new publication proclaimed that "it will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty … it will warmly advocate the cause of Reform; it will endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy; and to support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures."

Its most famous editor, C. P. Scott, made the Manchester Guardian into a nationally famous newspaper. He was editor for 57 years from 1872, and became its owner when he bought the paper from the estate of Taylor's son in 1907. Under Scott the paper's moderate editorial line became more radical, supporting Gladstone when the Liberals split in 1886, and opposing the Second Boer War against popular opinion. Scott's friendship with Chaim Weizmann played a role in the Balfour Declaration, and in 1948 the Guardian was a supporter of the State of Israel. The story of the relationship between the Guardian and the zionist movement and Israel is told in Daphna Baram's book "Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel". In June 1936 ownership of the paper was transferred to the Scott Trust (named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who was the first chairman of the Trust). This move ensured the paper's independence, and it was then noted for its eccentric style, its moralising and its detached attitude to its finances.

Stance

Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally in sympathy with the liberal to left-wing ends of the political spectrum. This is reflected in the paper's readership: a MORI Poll taken between April-June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters, (cited in International Socialism Spring 2003, ISBN 1-898876-97-5); according to another MORI poll taken in 2004, 44% of Guardian readers vote Labour and 37% vote Liberal Democrat.

Traditionally affiliated with the centrist Liberal Party, and with a northern circulation base, the paper earned a national reputation and the respect of the left during the Spanish Civil War, when along with the Liberal News Chronicle, the Labour Daily Herald, the Communist Daily Worker and several Sunday and weekly papers it supported the republicans against the insurgent nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.

In 1995, both the Granada Television programme World In Action and The Guardian were sued for libel by the then cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, for their allegation that the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Fahd had paid for Aitken and his wife to stay at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, which would have amounted to accepting a bribe on Aitken's part. Aitken publicly stated he would fight with "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play". The court case proceeded, and in 1997 The Guardian produced evidence that Aitken's claim of his wife paying for the hotel stay was untrue. In 1999, Aitken was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars The Guardian attracted a significant proportion of anti-war readers as one of the mass-media media outlets most critical of UK and USA military initiatives.

The Guardian is currently highly critical of Israeli defence policy. In December 2003 journalist Julie Burchill left the paper for The Times, citing this as one of the reasons for her move. In a recent controversy, the paper has been accused by Alan Dershowitz writing in the Jerusalem Post of bias and failure to print corrections of mis-statements of fact in their articles and editorials.

In August 2004, for the US presidential election, the daily G2 supplement, edited by Ian Katz, launched an experimental letter-writing campaign in Clark County, Ohio, a small county in a swing state. Katz bought a voter list from the county for $25 and asked people to write to those on the list undecided in the election. It was left to readers to decide in what way they should seek to influence these voters' preferences, but it was acknowledged that most Guardian readers would probably back John Kerry over George Bush. There was something of a backlash to this campaign, and on 21 October, 2004, the paper retired it. Clark County, which was narrowly won by Al Gore in 2000, swung to George W. Bush in 2004.

In October 2004 The Guardian published a humour column by Charlie Brooker in its entertainment guide, which appeared to call for the assassination of US President George W. Bush. This caused some controversy and the paper was forced to issue an apology and remove the article from its website.

Following the 7 July 2005 London bombings, The Guardian published an article on its comment pages by Dilpazier Aslam, a 27-year-old British Muslim journalism trainee from Yorkshire. Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group, and had published a number of articles on their website. According to the paper, it did not know that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir when he applied to become a trainee, though several staff members were informed of this once he started at the paper. The Home Office has claimed the group's "ultimate aim is the establishment of an Islamic state (Caliphate), according to Hizb ut-Tahrir via non-violent means". The Guardian asked Aslam to resign his membership of the group, and – when he did not do so – terminated his employment.

Format

The first edition was published on May 5, 1821, at which time the Guardian was a weekly, published on Saturdays and costing 7d.; the stamp duty on newspapers (4d. per sheet) forced the price up so high that it was uneconomic to publish more frequently. When the stamp duty was cut in 1836 the Guardian added a Wednesday edition; with the abolition of the tax in 1855 it became a daily paper costing 2 d.

In 1952 the paper took the step of printing news on the front page, replacing the adverts that had hitherto filled that space. The editor A.P. Wadsworth wrote, "it is not a thing I like myself, but it seems to be accepted by all the newspaper pundits that it is preferable to be in fashion".

File:GuardianHQLondon0.jpg

The Guardian's offices in London

In 1959 the paper dropped "Manchester" from its title, becoming simply The Guardian, and in 1964 it moved to London, losing some of its regional agenda but continuing to be heavily subsidised by sales of the less intellectual but much more profitable Manchester Evening News. The financial position remained extremely poor into the 1970s; at one time it was in merger talks with The Times. The paper consolidated its left-wing stance during the 1970s and 1980s but was both shocked and revitalised by the launch of The Independent in 1986 which competed for a similar readership and provoked the entire broadsheet industry into a fight for circulation.

In 1988 The Guardian had a significant redesign; as well as improving the quality of its printers ink, it also changed its masthead to its soon-familiar (but no-longer used as of 2005) juxtaposition of an italic Garamond "The", with a bold Helvetica "Guardian".

In 1992 it relaunched its features section as G2, a tabloid-format supplement. This innovation was widely copied by the other "quality" broadsheets, and ultimately led to the rise of "compact" papers and The Guardian's move to the Berliner format. In 1993 the paper declined to participate in the broadsheet 'price war' started by Rupert Murdoch's The Times. In June 1993, The Guardian bought The Observer from Lonrho, thus gaining a serious Sunday newspaper partner with similar political views.

The Guardian's offices in London

Its international weekly edition is now titled The Guardian Weekly, though it retained the title Manchester Guardian Weekly for some years after the home edition had moved to London. It includes sections from a number of other internationally significant newspapers of a somewhat left-of-centre inclination, including Le Monde.

In 2004, The Guardian introduced an online digital version of its print edition, allowing readers to download pages from the last 14 issues as PDF files.

In September 2005 The Guardian moved to the Berliner paper format and changed the design of its masthead.

Today The Guardian is the only British national newspaper to publish in full colour (although the edition for Northern Ireland still has much black-and-white content ); it was also the first newspaper in the UK to be printed on the Berliner size. In November 2005 The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 378,618 copies (November 2005), as compared to sales of 904,955 for the Daily Telegraph, 692,581 for The Times, and 261,193 for The Independent. The paper is sometimes known as "The Grauniad" (coined by Private Eye), as a result of frequent typesetting errors for which it became infamous in the era before computer typesetting (the joke is that it misspelled its own name in the masthead, though this never actually happened).

The Guardian in the popular imagination

The name the Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye; it came about because of a reputation for text mangling, technical typesetting failures and typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as "The Gaurdian". Although such errors are now less frequent than they used to be, the 'Corrections and clarifications' column can still often provide some amusement. There were even a number of errors in the first issue, perhaps the most notable being a notification that there would soon be some goods sold at atction instead of auction.

Until the foundation of the Independent, the Guardian was the only serious national daily newspaper in Britain that was not clearly conservative in its political affiliation. The term "Guardian reader" is therefore often used pejoratively by those who do not agree with the paper or self-deprecatingly by those who do. The stereotype of a Guardian reader is a person with leftist or liberal politics rooted in the 1960s, working in the public sector, regularly eating lentils and muesli, living in north London (especially Camden and Islington), wearing sandals and believing in alternative medicine and natural medicine as evidenced by Labour MP Kevin Hughes's largely rhetorical question in the House of Commons on November 19, 2001:

"Does my right hon. Friend find it bizarre — as I do — that the yoghurt- and muesli-eating, Guardian-reading fraternity are only too happy to protect the human rights of people engaged in terrorist acts, but never once do they talk about the human rights of those who are affected by them?"

The Guardian's science coverage is now extensive and although its Weekend supplement features a column by Emma Mitchell, a natural health therapist, and G2 was until the relaunch home to Edzard Ernst's weekly column on complementary medicine (Ernst is professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula medical school, ), the paper now carries the Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre and a quizzical column in G2 called The Sceptic [1], which looks at the evidence for popular treatments and remedies. Also, as alternative and complementary medicine has become more widely accepted most of the quality dailies now feature at least one column or writer devoted to the subject.

The stereotype, however, is a persistent feature of British political discourse. Even doctors have perpetuated it by using the acronym GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt) on patient notes.

The Guardian, along with other British news outlets, has a tradition of spoof articles on April Fool's Day, sometimes contributed by regular advertisers such as BMW. The most elaborate of these was a travel supplement on San Serriffe, whilst an article in the Guardian dated April 1 2006 written by one Olaf Priol suggested that Chris Martin of Coldplay would be supporting the Conservatives at the next General Election and had already written a campaign song for them. Olaf Priol is an anagram of April Fool.

External links

• Guardian Unlimited
• The Guardian Front Page RSS feed (in XML; use a news aggregator)
• Digital Guardian
• Founding of the Manchester Guardian
• Information about The Newsroom Archive and Visitor Centre
• Information about The Guardian Archive at John Rylands Library in Manchester
• Media Guardian: How the broadsheets brightened up
• The Guardian Unlimited Talk Board
• Independent on Sunday article on problems with the Berliner format change (subscription service)

References

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Template:Guardian Media Group

Credits

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