The Washington Post has had a crack at Mr Steerpike’s favourite game: trashing the Guardian. Full marks to them for a knock out job.
The Post describes Britain’s most sanctimonious rag as
‘a newspaper that’s small and underweight even by British standards’.
ZAP!
Then the Groaner really gets it where it hurts:
‘… the Guardian has its own sacred cows. Unlike its American media cousins, which have traditionally sought neutrality in their news reporting, the Guardian hews to the British model of identifying with a political party. The paper has been liberal since its founding by Manchester mill owners and cotton merchants; in the last British elections it supported the minority Liberal Democrats.
BOOM! And it gets worse for the
‘financially struggling, frankly liberal newspaper with a newsprint circulation of fewer than 160,000 copies daily (which makes it roughly the size of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)’
KAPOW!
One more Yankee salvo:
‘the paper lost about $1 million a week from 2009 to 2012. It continues to lose money, according to [Alan] Rusbridger. “We’ve been through lean times like everyone else,” he says. “Last year wasn’t great.”’
THUD!
The piece asks why a failing British newspaper would be interested in an American spying story. The theory doing the rounds is that the NSA fanfare was as financially motivated as it was journalistically. Veteran editor Alan Rusbriger sees the Guardian brand as an international solution to the domestic problem, which may explain why he was in New York when the NSA story broke.
Speaking of the story, it’s a shame that the original charge that the NSA had ‘direct access’ into the servers of software companies has not yet been proved. But what does that matter when there are flags to be planted on new soil, eh?
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