Via Prodicus, this little gem from Rod Liddle:
By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap. You will all have had your epiphanies long before me, I suspect, reading the smug drivel of la Toynbee and Gary Younge and Monbiot, or its pathetic attempts via The Guide to be down with the kids on the street (perhaps the worst written, most cringe-inducing, supplement in Fleet Street).
I have never bought a newspaper during my adulthood (that I can remember – so if I have, the occasion was so rare, I’ve forgotten it and the reason why). There is a sound reason for this; they are invariably written by ill-informed scumbags with no respect for fact and truth. People so lazy they cannot be bothered to check their facts before committing to print. Time and again, I have noted factual errors when areas of my expertise are subject to their stories. So, I can only presume that this ignorance, laziness and failure is standard practice.
When I was a child, my parents took the Sun. They switched to the Express when it changed hands and became the rag it is today. Not that the Express was much better, frankly. I recall prior to the 1979 election objecting to an editorial instructing me how to vote. I made a decision that day never to give these bastards any of my money. It is not up to a newspaper editor to tell me how to cast my vote. Subsequently, I became aware of the sheer magnitude of factual illiteracy in the reporting when I became involved with issues that made the news. Newspapers aren’t the only ones, of course, the Television news is just as bad.
I can almost forgive the rag-tops as they make no pretence about reason or truth – they sensationalise and do it openly; so browsing The Sun, Mirror, Star, Express, Mail or Sport, you know up front that you will not be getting a rational, objective presentation of the facts. The broad-sheets are supposed to be different, but they aren’t, they merely dress it up in pseudo intellectualism and none more sickeningly so than The Guardian.
The Guardian; supposedly a liberal paper, presents some of the most vile, illiberal opinions from its line up of bigots, eco-warriors, race hate mongers, professional victims and fascists. For example, if a man wrote a misogynistic article in the vein of Julie Bindel’s bigoted outpourings, it wouldn’t get past the editor – and if it did, there would be howls of outrage from the offended usual suspects. Likewise if a white man wrote an inverse Joseph Harker piece. Yet they publish blatant misandry from their resident feminists and blatantly racist identity politics from the likes of Harker, just as they publish calls for more state interference in our lives, just as, despite the virtual collapse of the AGW scam, they still peddle it. Oh, sure, they may have decided in the circumstances, to stop calling people deniers, but make no mistake, they are still firmly hitched to this bandwagon and the authoritarianism that goes with it.
My opinion of newspapers and the journalists who write for them is almost as low as my opinion of the politicians that they suck up to and enable; but I reserve my greatest contempt for the Guardian for the very reasons Liddle mentions in the quote above, so his words resonate well, I think.