No mention of your support for the invasion of Iraq then?
Iraq: the case for decisive action. Published 18th Jan 2003. ( https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/jan/19/leaders.politic... ).
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What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
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Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#12The 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
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#13By The Guardian.
Thanks for pointing that out. I almost missed it.
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#14Can we have all newspapers do this? I imagine few would be as honest as this
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...)
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#15Can we have all newspapers do this? I imagine few would be as honest as this
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 origin…
> 49 years
It seems that it took humans landing on a Moon to make them realize rockets can actually work in space.
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#16Guardian's "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies" Documentary:
Guardian hacks continue PR war against WikiLeaks
wikileaks.org/Guardian-s-WikiLeaks-Secrets-and.html
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#17A 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.
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#18Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#19The 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…
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.
Re: What we got wrong: the Guardian’s worst errors of judgment over 200 years
#20Can we have all newspapers do this? I imagine few would be as honest as this
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, ...