Londoner’s Diary
Divisions inside The Guardian spilled out in public yesterday when a behind-the-scenes dispatch about the newspaper dropped online.
The article, published by Left-wing outlet Novara Media, anonymously quotes a number of current and former Guardian employees who are critical of the paper’s editorial direction.
The piece airs a range of complaints against the paper’s editor Katharine Viner. Issues of contention include coverage of the Gaza conflict and the commissioning process for comment articles.
The anonymity of the complainants makes it hard to determine the range of dissent. The author of the piece spoke to “13 current and former Guardian journalists”. The article quotes five current and former “staffers”, one “senior Guardian journalist” and claims that corroboration on one point of fact had been obtained from “multiple Guardian journalists”. The Guardian Media Group, all told, employs over 1,500 people across its global editorial, production, sales, distribution and support branches.
It is unclear if “staffers” refers to editorial or non-editorial members of staff. The non-editorial side of The Guardian’s workforce is understood to be more actively Left-wing than its stable of journalists. And while the Guardian is famed for its “Left liberal” outlook, there has long been a political gulf between those in the paper who emphasise the Left and those who emphasise the liberal.
The public airing of grievances is perhaps unsurprising in the case of The Guardian. The paper has a strong culture of internal democracy and Viner’s selection as editor in 2015 was ratified by an indicative ballot of all staff.
The rather novel notion of an editor standing for election perhaps opens them to greater criticism. Those who voted for Viner believing her to be the “Left-wing” candidate for editor (she had famously written a play about the killing of pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie), for example, have scorned a supposedly Rightward drift.
Last year, Viner defended The Guardian from accusations by those on the Right that it had “deterred” gender-critical writers from opining on transgender issues in the newspaper. “You find more views represented in The Guardian than other news organisations. We do try to have a conversation and a debate and it’s complicated,” she said at the time.
