A small, big thing
The Guardian's mask falls again
The Guardian deleted another comment under their James Ball piece that contained nothing objectionable. But they feel they can safely delete it because, unlike me, Sian doesn’t have a Substack and can’t fight back. Sorry to post about this one tiny thing, but it’s worth thinking about this and the many other ways The Guardian distorts the conversation. It’s not just the right-wing media that deceives and panders to its audience.
Everyone seeing this will think she said something appalling, but she didn’t. Nevertheless, the woke religious police at the Guardian are unperturbed about putting a completely undeserved black mark against her name.
Go on, tell everyone why you banned her. Let’s see that white-hot hatred in the open. Publish her comment and tell us why it was unacceptable.
If you can’t do that, you should reinstate it, and apologise to Sian.
They have been like this for years sadly. The number of articles in the laughable 'Comment is Free' (Now 'Opinion') section has reduced dramatically in the last five years. And the number of those that are actually 'open for comment' is ludicrously low, or so it seems to me compared to five or six years ago.
This could, of course be because their crappy business model would not allow people to be paid for moderating comments. But I would incline more towards the fact that that there were more and more members of their loyal readership that disagreed strongly with the premises and the conclusions of various articles and the opinions of the columnists. Articles on immigration, Islam, terrorism and now gender ideology were either not open to comment, or closed down early or very heavily moderated. This is simply my observation as a former reader and commenter there.
I suppose that all newspapers have their agendas and directions, and each will be an echo chamber of its own values to a degree, but the G is supposed to be a left-leaning Liberal publication, and to silence the voices of intelligent and thoughtful readers expressing valid concerns on these particular subjects simply because those voices did not concur with the Gs own myopic vision and its own twisted, immature and adolescent version of liberalism, is a very poor show indeed. When its rosta of writers is led by truly great liberalist freethinkers such as Owen Jones, Nesrine Malik and Frankie fucking Boyle, whilst at the same time casting aside true liberals like Suzanne Moore, then I despair of it, and I want nothing to do with it.
The Guardian doesn't like healthy, reasonable disagreement.
If Sian lets us know what she said l’ll post the same comment and post on twitter and ask the question there.