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British national daily newspaper From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959,[4] followed by a move to London. Along with its sister papers, The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust Limited.[5] The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference".[6] The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in its journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders.[6] It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.[7][8]
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Front page on 28 May 2021 | |
| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet (1821–2005) Berliner (2005–2018) Compact (since 2018) |
| Owner(s) | Guardian Media Group |
| Founder(s) | John Edward Taylor |
| Publisher | Guardian Media Group |
| Editor-in-chief | Katharine Viner |
| Founded | 5 May 1821 (as The Manchester Guardian, renamed The Guardian in 1959) |
| Political alignment | Centre-left[1][2] |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | Kings Place, London |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Circulation | 105,134 (as of July 2021)[3] |
| Sister newspapers | The Observer The Guardian Weekly |
| ISSN | 0261-3077 (print) 1756-3224 (web) |
| OCLC number | 60623878 |
| Website | theguardian.com |
The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015.[9][10] Since 2018, the paper's main newsprint sections have been published in tabloid format. As of July 2021[update], its print edition had a daily circulation of 105,134.[3] The newspaper is available online; it lists UK, US (founded in 2011), Australian (founded in 2013), European, and International editions,[11] and its website has sections for World, Europe, US, Americas, Asia, Australia, Middle East, Africa, New Zealand,[12] Inequality, and Global development.
The paper's readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion,[13][14] and the term "Guardian reader" is used to imply a stereotype of a person with modern liberal, left-wing or "politically correct" views.[15] Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1970s, a nickname still occasionally used by the editors for self-mockery.[16][17]
In an Ipsos MORI research poll in September 2018 designed to interrogate the public's trust of specific titles online, The Guardian scored highest for digital-content news, with 84% of readers agreeing that they "trust what [they] see in it".[18] A December 2018 report of a poll by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company stated that the paper's print edition was found to be the most trusted in the UK in the period from October 2017 to September 2018. It was also reported to be the most-read of the UK's "quality newsbrands", including digital editions; other "quality" brands included The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and the i. While The Guardian's print circulation is in decline, the report indicated that news from The Guardian, including that reported online, reaches more than 23 million UK adults each month.[19]
Chief among the notable "scoops" obtained by the paper was the 2011 News International phone-hacking scandal—and in particular the hacking of the murdered English teenager Milly Dowler's phone.[20] The investigation led to the closure of the News of the World, the UK's best-selling Sunday newspaper and one of the highest-circulation newspapers in history.[21] In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the secret collection by the Obama administration of Verizon telephone records,[22] and subsequently revealed the existence of the surveillance program PRISM after knowledge of it was leaked to the paper by the whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.[23] In 2016, The Guardian led an investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then–Prime Minister David Cameron's links to offshore bank accounts. It has been named "newspaper of the year" four times at the annual British Press Awards: most recently in 2014, for its reporting on government surveillance.[24]
The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen.[25] They launched the paper, on 5 May 1821 (by chance the very day of Napoleon's death) after the police closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters.[26] Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers, writing: "They have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence. They do not toil, neither do they spin, but they live better than those that do."[27] When the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the mill-owners' champions had the upper hand.[28]
The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor during the establishment of the paper, and all of the Little Circle wrote articles for the new paper.[29] The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty ... warmly advocate the cause of Reform ... endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and ... support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures".[30] In 1825, the paper merged with the British Volunteer and was known as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer until 1828.[31]
The working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called The Manchester Guardian "the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners".[32] The Manchester Guardian was generally hostile to labour's claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill, the paper doubted whether in view of the foreign competition "the passing of a law positively enacting a gradual destruction of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom would be a much less rational procedure."[33] The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of outside agitators, stating that "if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone. They live on strife ... ."[34]
In March 2023, an academic review commissioned by the Scott Trust determined that John Edward Taylor and nine of his eleven backers had links to the Atlantic slave trade through their interests in Manchester's textile industry.[35]
The newspaper opposed slavery and supported free trade. An 1823 leading article on the continuing "cruelty and injustice" to slaves in the West Indies long after the abolition of the slave trade with the Slave Trade Act 1807 wanted fairness to the interests and claims both of the planters and of their oppressed slaves.[36] It welcomed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 and accepted the "increased compensation" to the planters as the "guilt of slavery attaches far more to the nation" rather than individuals. Success of the Act would encourage emancipation in other slave-owning nations to avoid "imminent risk of a violent and bloody termination."[37] However, the newspaper argued against restricting trade with countries that had not yet abolished slavery.[38]
Complex tensions developed in the United States.[39] When the abolitionist George Thompson toured, the newspaper said that "[s]lavery is a monstrous evil, but civil war is not a less one; and we would not seek the abolition even of the former through the imminent hazard of the latter". It suggested that the United States should compensate slave-owners for freeing slaves[40] and called on President Franklin Pierce to resolve the 1856 "civil war", the Sacking of Lawrence due to pro-slavery laws imposed by Congress.[41]
In 1860, The Observer quoted a report that the newly elected president Abraham Lincoln was opposed to abolition of slavery.[42] On 13 May 1861, shortly after the start of the American Civil War, the Manchester Guardian portrayed the Northern states as primarily imposing a burdensome trade monopoly on the Confederate States, arguing that if the South was freed to have direct trade with Europe, "the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease". Therefore, the newspaper asked "Why should the South be prevented from freeing itself from slavery?"[43] This hopeful view was also held by the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone.[44]
There was division in Britain over the Civil War, even within political parties. The Manchester Guardian had also been conflicted. It had supported other independence movements and felt it should also support the rights of the Confederacy to self-determination. It criticised Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation for not freeing all American slaves.[44] On 10 October 1862, it wrote: "It is impossible to cast any reflections upon a man so evidently sincere and well-intentioned as Mr Lincoln but it is also impossible not to feel that it was an evil day both for America and the world, when he was chosen President of the United States".[45] By then, the Union blockade was causing suffering in British towns. Some including Liverpool supported the Confederacy as did "current opinion in all classes" in London. On 31 December 1862, cotton workers held a meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester which resolved "its detestation of negro slavery in America, and of the attempt of the rebellious Southern slave-holders to organise on the great American continent a nation having slavery as its basis". There was a comment that "an effort had been made in a leading article of the Manchester Guardian to deter the working men from assembling together for such a purpose". The newspaper reported all this and published their letter to President Lincoln[46] while complaining that "the chief occupation, if not the chief object of the meeting, seems to have been to abuse the Manchester Guardian".[45] Lincoln replied to the letter thanking the workers for their "sublime Christian heroism" and American ships delivered relief supplies to Britain.[46]
The newspaper reported the shock to the community of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, concluding that "[t]he parting of his family with the dying President is too sad for description",[47] but in what from today's perspective looks an ill-judged editorial wrote that "[o]f his rule we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty", adding: "it is doubtless to be regretted that he had not the opportunity of vindicating his good intentions".[44]
According to Martin Kettle, writing for The Guardian in February 2011: "The Guardian had always hated slavery. But it doubted the Union hated slavery to the same degree. It argued that the Union had always tacitly condoned slavery by shielding the southern slave states from the condemnation they deserved. It was critical of Lincoln's emancipation proclamation for stopping short of a full repudiation of slavery throughout the US. And it chastised the president for being so willing to negotiate with the south, with slavery one of the issues still on the table."[48]
C. P. Scott made the newspaper nationally recognised. He was editor for 57 years from 1872, and became its owner when he bought the paper from the estate of Taylor's son in 1907. Under Scott, the paper's moderate editorial line became more radical, supporting William Gladstone when the Liberals split in 1886, and opposing the Second Boer War against popular opinion.[49] Scott supported the movement for women's suffrage, but was critical of any tactics by the suffragettes that involved direct action:[50] "The really ludicrous position is that Mr Lloyd George is fighting to enfranchise seven million women and the militants are smashing unoffending people's windows and breaking up benevolent societies' meetings in a desperate effort to prevent him." Scott thought the Suffragettes' "courage and devotion" was "worthy of a better cause and saner leadership".[51] It has been argued that Scott's criticism reflected a widespread disdain, at the time, for those women who "transgressed the gender expectations of Edwardian society".[50]
Scott commissioned J. M. Synge and his friend Jack Yeats to produce articles and drawings documenting the social conditions of the west of Ireland; these pieces were published in 1911 in the collection Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara.[52]
Scott's friendship with Chaim Weizmann played a role in the Balfour Declaration. In 1948 The Manchester Guardian was a supporter of the new State of Israel.[citation needed]
Ownership of the paper passed in June 1936 to the Scott Trust (named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who was the first chairman of the Trust). This move ensured the paper's independence.[53][additional citation(s) needed]
From 1930 to 1967, a special archival copy of all the daily newspapers was preserved in 700 zinc cases. These were found in 1988 whilst the newspaper's archives were deposited at the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library, on the Oxford Road campus. The first case was opened and found to contain the newspapers issued in August 1930 in pristine condition. The zinc cases had been made each month by the newspaper's plumber and stored for posterity. The other 699 cases were not opened and were all returned to storage at The Guardian's garage, owing to shortage of space at the library.[54]
Traditionally affiliated with the centrist to centre-left Liberal Party, and with a northern, non-conformist circulation base, the paper earned a national reputation and the respect of the left during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia (1938): "Of our larger papers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty".[55] With the pro-Liberal News Chronicle, the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, the Communist Party's Daily Worker and several Sunday and weekly papers, it supported the Republican government against General Francisco Franco's insurgent nationalists.[56]
The paper's then editor,