The Guardian

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The Guardian is a British newspaper published by Guardian Newspapers Limited. It is a serious broadsheet newspaper with relatively left wing politics. Until 1959 it was called The Manchester Guardian, and the paper is still sometimes referred to by this name, especially in North America. The Guardian has a daily circulation of around 400,000 (2002), compared to 620,000 for The Times, 920,000 for the Daily Telegraph and 230,000 for The Independent. The paper is also sometimes known as the Grauniad, due to the frequent typographical errors for which it became infamous, though which are now uncommon.

Ownership

The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group of newspapers, radio stations, and new media including The Observer Sunday newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, and the Guardian Unlimited, one of the most popular online news resources on the Internet. All the aforementioned are owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation.

The Guardian and its parent groups are a participant in Project Syndicate [1], established by George Soros, and have recently intervened to save the Mail & Guardian in South Africa [2], but Guardian Media Group later sold the shares of the Mail & Guardian it held.

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 first edition was published on May 5, 1821, and it became a daily paper in 1855.

Its most famous editor, C. P. Scott made the Manchester Guardian into a noted newspaper. He was editor for 57 years from 1872, buying the paper from the estate of Taylor's son in 1907.

In June 1936, to avoid death duty, ownership of the paper was passed to the Scott Trust (named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who was the first chairman of the Trust). The paper was then noted for its eccentric style, its moralising and its detached attitude to its finances.

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 now defunct News Chronicle it was the only UK source of news that was not tainted by support for the insurgent nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.

The Guardian's offices in London

In 1959 the paper dropped "Manchester" from its title, becoming simply The Guardian, and 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 similar readers 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 print and cutting down on the typographical errors that had previously characterised it. The paper declined to participate in the broadsheet 'price war' started by Rupert Murdoch's The Times in 1993.

In 1995, both the Granada Television program World In Action and The Guardian were sued for libel by the now-disgraced cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, due to their allegations the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Fahd paid for Aitken and his wife to stay at the Ritz hotel in Paris, which would amount to accepting a bribe on Aitken's part. Aitken publically stated he would fight with "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play" [3]. 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. [4] In 1999, Aitken was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice. [5]

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars The Guardian picked up additional anti-war readers as one of the few anti-war newspapers. The newspaper also gained anti-war readers in the United States where there were few anti-war rivals.

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 that day's issue as a PDF file.

The Guardian has recently announced plans to change to a "Berliner" or "midi" format similar to that used by Le Monde in France and some other European papers; at 470×315 mm, this is slightly larger than a traditional tabloid. Expected to take place by early 2006, this change is either a response to, or has the same cause as, the moves by The Times and The Independent to start publishing in tabloid (or "compact") format.

Supplements

The Guardian comes with the G2 supplement—containing feature articles—on weekdays. Other supplements are included during the week including:

  • Media, Sport "tabloid" (Monday)
  • Education (Tuesday)
  • Society (Wednesday)—Covers the British public sector and related issues.
  • Life, Online (Thursday)—"Life" covers science.
  • Friday Review (Friday)—Covers music and film.

The affectionate name the Grauniad for the paper came about because, in the past, it was noted for frequent text mangling, technical typesetting failures and typographical errors, including once misspelling its own name in the 1970s. 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 England that was not clearly conservative in its political affiliation. The term "Guardian reader" is therefore often used pejoratively by right-wingers. The reactionary 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, wearing sandals and believing in alternative medicine and natural medicine as evidenced by Labour MP Kevin Hughes' 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?"

Hansard

Like most stereotypes, this one is both inaccurate and outdated (for example, the Guardian's science coverage is extensive and is characterised by a contempt for alternative medicine), but it is a persistent feature of English political discourse.

Even Doctors perpetuate the stereotype by using the acronym GROLIES on patient notes. The acronym expands to Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt. [6]

The Guardian 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.

Editors

Current columnists

Notable regular contributors (past and present)

Other publications of the same name

The Guardian was also the title of

  1. a short-lived publication of 1713, founded by Richard Steele and featuring contributions by his collaborator Joseph Addison.
  2. a weekly Anglican newspaper founded in 1846 by Richard William Church and others, which ran until 1951.
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