Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief caves to pro-Israel pressure
JVL Introduction
In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, Novara Media reporter Rivkah Brown reports on why the Guardian has positioned itself ever-so cautiously in its coverage of the war on Gaza.
The Editor-in-Chief, Kath Viner, has a decisive influence on the overall balance of the Guardian’s’ reporting and, argues Brown, is overly influenced by the paper’s pro-Israel detractors.
While Viner’s predecessor Alan Rushbridger’s attitude to them was distanced scepticism, “Viner’s, say colleagues, is ingratiating… The result… is a reactive commissioning strategy focused on appeasement.”
Since October 7th Viner has increased her supervisory role, with every opinion piece about Israel and Palestine going to her for sign-off. The result is that the Guardian’s comment pages “have come to reflect its editor’s susceptibility to criticism”.
Brown shows in some detail how this has worked out in practice.
A must-read article.
RK
This article was originally published by Novara Media on Tue 12 Mar 2024. Read the original here.
How the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Caved to Pro-Israel Pressure
‘Kath takes the Board of Deputies very seriously.’
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A clear, well researched article with one very large omission: a total absence of any discussion of the Guardian’s role in demonizing Jeremy Corbyn for alleged antisemitism. The Guardian, as Jamie Stern-Weiner and others have established, shared with the BBC the main responsibility for this character assassination, and it practically coincided with Viner’s appointment as editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Can that be put down to her dislike of controversy?
Guardian only an expensive Hello magazine
Excellent article. It’s like drawing back the curtains, opening a window and letting some fresh air in.
Many of us have spent time wondering what happened to The Guardian – and The Observer – after Rusbridger left.
Once a place to go for discussion, facilitated by Georgina Henry’s wonderful ‘Comment is Free’, it, now, feels like a place to go if you feel the need to be abused, whether by other commenters, or the moderators.
Dr Robert Boyce asks a very good question re : Jeremy Corbyn. There are many of us who would like an answer to that.
Too right; a long-time reader of the paper I gave up on it a several years ago.
Illuminating. Another omission is any mention of ASSANGE!!!
The article is rather too generous to the Guardian in that it focuses purely on its policing of opinion, not its censorship of factual material. It was noticeable, for example, that when Desmond Tutu and Bruce Kent died the Guardian published fulsome obituaries of both but failed in both cases to mention that they had been strong supporters of Palestinian rights. People trying to point this out were barred from both the letters page and the website. I cannot be the only person whose post correcting a purely factual omission was deleted because it breached the paper’s ‘community standards’.
Given that the Guardian still continuously parrots the slogan “Opinion is free; fact is sacred” its persistent refusal to observe the principle is striking.
I cancelled my subscription to the Guardian because of its anti-Palestinian, pro-Zionist bias over a year ago. With the exception of Patrick Cockburn, The Independent is rabidly pro-Zionist. I plan to cancel my subscription to the i, but it is a lot cheaper than the Gruniad. What do I do? I need News, and BBC R4 is largely pro-Zionist, though a bit more balnced
It is not a “war”. It is ethnic cleansing / genocide dating back decades and justifiable resistance to it!
@ John Hall
As a fellow “news junkie”, when I want to follow news items likely to be ignored or misconstrued in the UK mainstream press I Google search for them.
Some of the sources I now value for the quality of their coverage came as a surprise to me – Sky News, for example.
The Guardian was on the downhill slide years ago with the departure of people of the quality of David Hearst and Jonathan Cook, both of whom are authoritative voices on middle eastern politics.
The failure to defend Assange and then Corbyn (flip-flop Jones used the paper to undermine him) was particularly damaging: behaviour one expects from the Tory press but all the more damaging coming from a paper that poses as left/liberal.
Viner’s game became most apparent when she sacked the country’s greatest political cartoonist, Steve Bell, replacing him for the most part with inferior dross.
Off-topic maybe but Viner’s insistence on paying her partner Adrian Chiles to write pure drivel deserves a mention.
Brown’s article is spot on in identifying Viner’s chief tenet: no principle is too sacred to be sacrificed to her own personal ambition.
I’ve gone back and forth about what I’ve called The Groanaid several times. I’ve cancelled, resubscribed, recancelled (currently read for free). The world is messy, as many have said. I constantly remind myself that it’s not long ago that the government threatened to close it down. I’m old enough to remember the glory days of Alastair Hetherington (who braved the advertisers, the cancellers and the slanderers during the Six Day War). I think Peter Preston was almost as good and as brave (tho’ his nerve did fail him once or twice). I liked Rusbridger although I think the rot began a little under his reign (I think someone took him on a tour of Israel once and they told him stuff …)
In the same way I’ve waxed warm and cool over MediaLens too, once writing that if the G did what it and others like-minded wanted, it would end up with, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a few thousand readers and a guy whose great-grandfather once met Keir Hardie.
The late cultural commentator, philosopher and sometime Labour MP Bryan Magee wrote in his ‘Confessions of a Philosopher’, “I came to realize, then, that what matters above all else in politics is what happens, not what people say about it. And for the most part what happens is independent of my wishes. In politics especially, people tend to allow their wishes to influence their assessment of reality, and to mix up the two even at conscious levels of thinking.”
It can’t be easy to be editor-in-chief of the Guardian (or indeed a decent journalist at the BBC) in this contumelious world, looking now closer by the day to its apocalyptic end.
As they say, if wishes were horses this beggar would ride. We all would.
The Guardian is as useless on Ukraine as it is on Israel.
To the person above who wonders where to get their news from: JVL and Al Jazeera.
Freedland’s point
“To describe Israeli Jews as “white” was inaccurate, Freedland said, since at least half of Israel’s Jewish population is Mizrachi (Middle Eastern and north African) or Ethiopian”
Is about as manipulative and duplicitous as possible. Jewish people of colour in Israel have been experiencing a continuing history of racial oppression- including eugenics. Hiding Israel’s oppression behind their ethnic appearance, while they suffer this is appalling (a large part of the Israeli class system is based upon these racial hierarchies, with some of these groups bought from neighbouring countries as cheap manual labor). See link below
Incidentally during the worst of the USA’s periods of racial oppression – including segregation, lynching, anti-miscegenation law – you could similarly claim the population was diverse.
But only Freedland would claim that the existence of oppressed racial groups legitimised the regime of oppression.
https://mronline.org/2020/12/04/a-racist-endeavour-zionist-israels-black-jewish-victims-of-color/