Truth is the first casualty of war but the Guardian needs some new spectacles
Last Wednesday the Guardian carried an Editorial noting that truth is the first casualty of war but its perspective on the matter was curiously one-dimensional. I doubt that too many take the propaganda of the current aggressor in Ukraine, Putin. But a considerable number of countries abstained on the question of the war in a recent UN vote. A few may be in hock to Putin but most will have looked back on US and NATO statements on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and understood that these did not contain the truth and nothing but either.
While the Guardian has carried a couple of comment pieces from Lindsey German from the Stop the War Coalition, which condemns Putin’s war but wants a negotiated settlement not NATO sabre rattling, it has published attacks on Stop the War from George Monbiot and Zoe Williams. Fair enough it might be said. But beyond that the general thrust of reports and comment has been pro-NATO including several pieces along the lines of World War Three, Wahey!!. Discussion of how the fighting might be stopped and an agreed peace restored is harder to find. Likewise commentary on the reality that while refugees from Ukraine deserve the support Boris Johnson has no intention of giving them, and there is an important duty of solidarity, Ukraine as a country before the war had many issues and was not fully in the democratic category, even by Britain’s limited standards.
It’s a rather a long way from the roots of the Manchester Guardian and its difficult to avoid the point that this stems from its lamentable at best coverage of the period when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. It got into the habit of reporting and commenting on matters not as they were but as the Editorial team thought they should be. A quite common trend on the left but in the past one often expected or at least hoped for better from the Guardian.
I’m not giving up on or boycotting the Guardian, as I know numbers have. I don’t expect, and indeed I hope not, to agree with a good deal it publishes. There is still a lot of good journalism there but the trajectory of the last few years raises some concerns about the important traditions in British journalism the Guardian stands for, or at least did stand for.
I’ve had to stop reading the bullshit the Graun spouts on the Ukraine. Its hypocrisy is just too galling. Its coverage of Corbyn was similarly vomit inducing. It has certainly lurched to the right since its governance structure was ‘reformed’, but along with the Independent, it’s less galling than the rest. Which is a pretty lamentable situation for those of us who are on the left.