Grow up - you silly little man

Some of us would dearly love that. Unfortunately, obsession with the market and chasing ratings etc are two factors in the ongoing dumbing-down of the media in the UK, and the subsequent dumbing down of the public discourse.



At least the Guardian doesn't profit from the sexualisation of underage girls.

Agreed.
But the Rowntree have at least put the effort in to finding out.


Again, at least they have done the research.

p.s.
Please don't include me in the all-approving Guardian readership.
I do read it but there's plenty in there that's ephemeral and woolly.
I also regularly read the Telegraph, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, Private Eye, Land Rover Owner and the Nauticalia catalogue.

The problem is Clinton - a truly incredible individual, his presentational skills are second to none, all the rest are very pale imitations of the master. He showed the way - sadly.

On the Guardian - not disputing your point - but the fact still remains it has every much an agenda as every other daily paper. Much of their stuff is very agends-driven, poorly researched and poorly written allbeit in words beyond one syllabul.

The government's Work Programme managed to get 3.6% of the people on the scheme off benefits and into secure employment in its first 14 months.

An unqualified success, shurely.

Well, until you measure it against their own declared target of 5%, which wasn't the most over-optomistic of targets to start with

JFR - not disputing they have done the research but doesn't mean a slant isn't put on their findings, let's face it their's is not the only solution to the issues they raise.

On the Guardian - not suggesting for one minute you are a devotee just the higher esteem it is held on here than any other daily.

One could suggest that that went back to JFK. Which to some extent may mean that what we're actually talking about is politicians in a TV age – and particularly those who have grown up in that TV age.



I'm far from the biggest fan of the Guardian, and think some of their stuff very sloppy, together with also intensely disliking their (or at least Rusbridger's) obsession with giving so-called 'rad fem' bigots a platform. But you can have an agenda – or at least a philosophy – and still produce much better journalism than is being seen widely these days. As the late Robin Day once said: "There are only two newspapers that tell the truth: the Financial Times, which has to tell the truth for the business community, and the Morning Star, which has to tell the truth for the workers."

One of the problems has been the blurring between report and editorialisation. Should be a no no. But it affects almost all papers. I remember being introduced to the Telegraph in the late 1980s – a really good paper. You didn't have to agree with all it's op-eds – which were clearly defined – to appreciate its breadth of reporting, for instance. But there's a reason that even regular Telegraph readers are now calling it the Maily Telegraph.

The obsession with celebrity is another problem that crosses boundaries and has now infected the broadsheets. And the petty crassness of some articles. In the Guardian a week or so ago, because restaurant critic Jay Rayner had tweeted something about never having had a dishwasher, he was asked to pen a whole piece on that vital matter. FFS.

Although I will say, in the Guardian's favour, this week it at least it managed to be the only one of the papers I caught up with that had not (deliberately or otherwise) misunderstood Hilary Mantel's LRB lecture and then tried to whip readers into a storm over it. The Mail and the Sun were the worst for that, but the Telegraph and Independent were not far behind.

And that – to me at any rate – also illustrates the dumbing down, where so many people read what the papers had said and assumed that that was correct, and then went and used the internet to blast Mantel, sometimes in downright abusive terms. It didn't occur to their dim little minds to actually find and read the original; their knees were a-jerking too much by that stage. And then, of course, you get both Cameron and Miliband feeling the need to add their fourpenneth. Now either neither of them had read the original and simply took the tabloid version at face value – or they had read it and didn't understand it; or they simply went with the populist approach. None of those options is remotely good.

And this is without considering the non-print news media.

And you base this notion on what exactly? As Minty pointed out the evidence points to the opposite. The more developed the society the lower the birth rate.

Dismissing the Guardian because the editorial has an agenda, as all papers do, is lazy.

Papers like the Guardian tend to separate news i.e. fact based reporting from editorial opinion far better than tabloids (including the Mail).

I can't remember what thread it was on but I quoted some facts from the Guardian to which Robinson made his stock reply of "It's in the Guardian so there is no point following the link". I then found the exact same set of facts written in the Telegraph.

The "It's the Guardian so its no use" line is pretty pathetic really. It just shows the people who trot that line out can't dispute what is actually written in the paper.