Tag Archives: the guardian

How the Guardian makes the news, then reports the news

By Mark Pack | Published 8th February 2012 - 7:58 pm

A nimble two-step from The Guardian:

1. Polly Toynbee sends tweet encouraging all and sundry to take part in an open-access online poll being run by the BMJ.

2. The Guardian reports result of said BMJ poll.

Then only thing missing, alas, is:

3. The Guardian then realises that reporting a voodoo poll which its own staff have been encouraging people to take part on is low grade self-referential journalism and pulls poll report.

 

Hat tip: Anthony Wells

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NEW POLL: Who is your Liberal Voice of the Year?

By Stephen Tall | Published 1st January 2012 - 2:45 pm

Today’s the day we launch our search for the Liberal Voice of 2011 to find the individual or group which has had the biggest impact on liberalism in the past 12 months. This is the fifth annual award, and as is our tradition, we’re looking beyond the ranks of the Lib Dems to find the greatest liberal who’s not a member of our party.

The list of nine nominees appears below. These were sought from Lib Dem members via our most recent survey; 233 nominations were submitted, and each of those short-listed needed to clear a threshold of five.

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VIDEO: Paddy Ashdown, Shirley Williams and Julian Glover on the Liberal Democrats, recession and The Guardian

By Mark Pack | Published 23rd December 2011 - 10:55 am

You can now watch again in full one of the best fringe meetings from the party conference, which saw Paddy Ashdown, Shirley Williams and the then Guardian editorial writer Julian Glover launch a new history of the party and its predecessors, Peace, Reform and Liberation.*

Julian Glover gave a very funny speech about his newspaper’s love/hate relationship with the party – “So there you have it, 150 years from The Guardian and the Manchester Guardian calling on the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats to be brave, radical; praising the party’s policies and then writing it off as irrelevant”.

Shirley Williams …

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LibLink | In praise of… Shirley Williams

By NewsHound | Published 20th November 2011 - 10:08 am

One of this week’s Guardian leader columns, ‘In praise of…’, was deservedly dedicated to Shirley Williams, a Lib Dem peer, founding member of the SDP, and former Labour education secretary. Here’s a snippet:

Forever running late, but with a warmth that ensures she’s forgiven, Williams has great faith in reasonable compromise. She has pursued a more softly-softly approach towards the dreadful health bill than we have advocated. But survivors of the SDP’s internecine wars recall a wily chair perfectly capable of calling a crunch vote when an awkward customer had gone to the loo, and it is too early to judge

…

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How best to boost growth? Coalition debate sees Tories argue for supply-side reforms, Lib Dems pushing for new ‘pension infrastructure fund’

By Stephen Tall | Published 15th November 2011 - 7:35 am

As the OECD forecasts a sharp slowdown in global growth, the Coalition is re-examining old and new ideas to boost the economy here in the UK. And, judging by this report in The Guardian, the likely approach illustrates the impact of Lib Dem thinking within government…

The Coalition choice: Tory supply-side reforms OR…

One area that has been looked at to boost growth is supply-side reforms to free up the labour market, such as those championed by Conservative adviser Adrian Beecroft. The ‘Beecroft Report’ has urged radical reform, most controversially advocating the government to stimulate private industry to hire workers …

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Opinion: Whisper it, but the press are starting to get it

By James Percival | Published 2nd September 2011 - 8:53 am

Whisper it, but it seems they might be starting to get it. It’s only taken them a year and a half.

‘They’ of course are the assorted numpties of the British press and ‘it’ is how coalition government works and just how important and influential Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are within it.

For most of the time since May 2010 a crude and simplistic caricature of our government and the Lib Dems’ role in it has taken hold – that this is really a Tory government and the Lib Dems are either naive puppets being taken for a ride by …

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Could you edit The Guardian? Take a simple test

By Mark Pack | Published 1st August 2011 - 7:56 am

Here’s a simple test to see if you too have what it takes to edit The Guardian.

a. You have an interview lined up with a Treasury minister.

b. You have a journalist who happily admits they don’t understand the difference between a cyclical and structural deficit.

Do you say:

1. “Pah, so what? It’s not like we need an interviewer who can understand the basics of economics to interview an economics minister”, or

2. “Err, could we get a different interviewer?”

If your answer is #1: well done, you’re made it (as the third paragraph of this new interview with Danny Alexander demonstrates).

If your …

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Opinion: Why David Cameron will not be Prime Minister in a year’s time

By Paul Walter | Published 23rd July 2011 - 12:33 pm

Bizarrely, I was watching dancing coal miners dressed in tutus when I heard the news of Sir Paul Stephenson’s resignation last Sunday evening. A little trigger went off in my mind. Suddenly, the unthinkable had become thinkable. “Cameron will be next” I thought.

OK. We’re now in the “long grass” of the parliamentary recess. Cameron put in a “Tory Trebles all round”, barn-storming performance at the dispatch box on Wednesday. He must have been thankful it was jet-lag proof Johannesburg he had come from (where he met a different type of Tutu) and not New York, with its jet-lag on the …

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Opinion: Hackgate – Who do you trust?

By Paul Walter | Published 21st July 2011 - 10:53 am

5 Live Drive had a poll yesterday on “Who do you trust?”, particularly with Hackgate in mind.

Emerging, blinking, from two weeks of saturation “Breaking News”, answering that question is a good way to take stock of where we are.

Who do I trust?

Vince Cable is the first person who springs to mind. He (inadvertently publicly) “declared war on Mr Murdoch”. He was then forced to be “hors de combat”. He said “I think we are going to win” and we did. Murdoch is in retreat. Well done, Vince.

Tom Watson is the second person I trust as a result of this …

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In Praise of Nick Davies, the British Bernstein & Woodward to Murdoch’s Nixon

By Stephen Tall | Published 9th July 2011 - 11:50 am

One man, above all, deserves to be singled-out for his single-minded pursuit of the lies, deceit and criminality that have stained British journalism: The Guardian’s special correspondent, Nick Davies.

His has been a lonely crusade. Despite the mounting evidence of corrupt practices, the tentacles of which have extended right into the very centre of the Establishment in this country — Parliament, media barons, senior police officers, Downing Street — Nick Davies has doggedly pursued a campaign which has resulted in the closure of this country’s most-read newspaper. That is some accolade.

But, as he would be the first to point out, it should never have got this far.

The closure of the News of the World would have been avoided if those who knew the truth, or at least had the power to uncover the truth, had done their jobs properly, had fulfilled their duty to the public. And that’s as true of Rebekah Brooks as it is of ‘Yates of the Yard’.

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Opinion: Liberal Democrats to hold inquiry into AV Referendum

By Simon McGrath | Published 28th June 2011 - 9:29 am

The Guardian reports that the Party has decided to hold an inquiry, headed by James Gurling, into the Yes to AV campaign.

I wrote a piece for Lib Dem Voice back in May calling for an inquiry and since then more and more information has come to light about the shambolic and incompetent way the Yes campaign was run.

What does seem rather odd is that there has been no announcement to Party members and activists that this inquiry was taking place and asking for their input. I asked a couple of Lib Dems who had been highly active in …

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What has the DPM done for us?

By Helen Duffett | Published 15th June 2011 - 3:37 pm

Lib Dem blogger Matthew Gibson has blogged Nick Clegg’s achievements as DPM over the past year, as viewed by the mainstream media.

Matthew’s been monitoring the papers for months, noting all the positive stories about the Deputy PM and Lib Dem leader.

He splits these up by the common themes that have emerged: leadership, competence, being principled and standing his ground.

Here’s a taster:

Competence

The Independent praise Nick Clegg’s simple and direct language in his speech at Conference concluding ‘Clegg knows what he is doing – quite unusual for a leader of a party’ (see here).

The Daily Telegraph believe

…

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My letter to The Guardian, unpublished

By Mark Pack | Published 22nd April 2011 - 2:54 pm

Sir,

I noticed that around half the recent stories about phone hacking on the Guardian website with photos feature a photograph of Sienna Miller. Does she make up around half of all the people whose phones were hacked?

Yours etc.

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Charles Kennedy to join Ed Miliband on a pro-electoral reform platform

By Mark Pack | Published 17th March 2011 - 8:55 am

It’s hardly surprising that Charles Kennedy and Ed Miliband would be appearing together to promote electoral reform. Kennedy has long been a supporter of electoral reform and by virtue of not being in government is seen by many in Labour as an easier figure to campaign alongside (even though one of Kennedy’s first acts on becoming party leader was to end the party’s then work in government with Labour). Ed Milband in turn is the author of Labour’s general election manifesto which not only pledged a referendum but also called for a change in the electoral system to follow from …

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We all know the Lib Dems U-turned on tuition fees, so why’s The Guardian indulging in half-truths?

By Stephen Tall | Published 13th November 2010 - 12:01 am

The Guardian carries a sensationalist headline tonight: Revealed: Lib Dems planned before election to abandon tuition fees pledge. The truth is somewhat different from the newspaper’s anti-Lib Dem spin, however.

The story is clearly designed to make the reader believe that, even as Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems spoke out against tuition fees, it was secretly their plan to renege on the party’s manifesto pledge. Yet, if you read more carefully it becomes clear that the party was simply anticipating the likely hung parliament scenario — that faced with two parties, Labour and the Tories, committed to tuition fees …

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