History
The Manchester Guardian was founded in radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the hit of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers, writing: "They have appealed non to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence. They do non toil, neither do they spin, but they survive better than those that do." When the government closed down the Manchester Observer, the mill-owners' champions had the upper hand.
The influential journalist Jeremiah Garnett joined Taylor during the defining of the paper, and all of the Little Circle wrote articles for the new paper. The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty ... warmly advocate the cause of remake ... endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and ... support, without acknowledgment to the party from which they emanate, any serviceable measures". In 1825, the paper merged with the British Volunteer and was so-called as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer until 1828.
The working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser called The Manchester Guardian "the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst constituent of the mill-owners". The Manchester Guardian was broadly hostile to labour's claims. Of the 1832 Ten Hours Bill, the paper doubted whether in picture of the foreign competition "the passing of a law positively enacting a gradual waste of the cotton manufacture in this kingdom would be a much less rational procedure." The Manchester Guardian dismissed strikes as the work of external agitators, stating that "if an accommodation can be effected, the occupation of the agents of the Union is gone. They exist on strife ... ."
The newspaper opposed slavery and supported free trade. An 1823 leading article on the continuing "cruelty and injustice" to slaves in the West Indies long after the abolition of the slave trade with the Slave Trade Act 1807 wanted fairness to the interests and claims both of the planters and of their oppressed slaves. It welcomed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 and accepted the "increased compensation" to the planters as the "guilt of slavery atttributes far more to the nation" rather than individuals. Success of the Act would encourage emancipation in other slave-owning nations to avoid "imminent risk of a violent and bloody termination." However, the newspaper argued against restricting trade with countries which had not yet abolished slavery.
Complex tensions developed in the United States. When the abolitionist George Thompson toured, the newspaper said that "[s]lavery is a monstrous evil, but civil war is not a less one; and we would not seek the abolition even of the former through the imminent hazard of the latter". It suggested that the United States should compensate slave-owners for freeing slaves and called on President Franklin Pierce to settle the 1856 "civil war", the Sacking of Lawrence due to pro-slavery laws imposed by Congress.
In 1860, The Observer quoted a report that the newly elected president Abraham Lincoln was opposed to abolition of slavery. On 13 May 1861, shortly after the start of the American Civil War, the Manchester Guardian portrayed the Northern states as primarily establish a burdensome trade monopoly on the Confederate States, arguing that if the South was freed to have direct trade with Europe, "the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease". Therefore, the newspaper asked "Why should the South be prevented from freeing itself from slavery?" This hopeful idea was also held by the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone.
There was division in Britain over the Civil War, even within political parties. The Manchester Guardian had also been conflicted. It had supported other suffering in British towns. Some including Liverpool supported the Confederacy as did "current opinion in all classes" in London. On 31 December 1862, cotton workers held a meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester which resolved "its detestation of negro slavery in America, and of the attempt of the rebellious Southern slave-holders to organise on the great American continent a nation having slavery as its basis". There was athat "an try had been made in a leading article of the Manchester Guardian to deter the working men from assembling together for such a purpose". The newspaper reported all this and published their letter to President Lincoln while complaining that "the chief occupation, if not the chief object of the meeting, seems to have been to abuse the Manchester Guardian". Lincoln replied to the letter thanking the workers for their "sublime Christian heroism" and American ships delivered relief supplies to Britain.
The newspaper reported the shock to the community of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, concluding that "[t]he parting of his manner with the dying President is too sad for description", but in what from today's perspective looks an ill-judged editorial wrote that "[o]f his sources we can never speak apart from as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional modification and human liberty", adding "it is doubtless to be regretted that he had not the opportunity of vindicating his proceeds intentions".
According to Martin Kettle, writing for The Guardian in February 2011, "The Guardian had always hated slavery. But it doubted the Union hated slavery to the same degree. It argued that the Union had always tacitly condoned slavery by shielding the southern slave states from the condemnation they deserved. It was critical of Lincoln's emancipation proclamation for stopping short of a full repudiation of slavery throughout the US. And it chastised the president for being so willing to negotiate with the south, with slavery one of the issues still on the table".
women's suffrage, but was critical of any tactics by the Suffragettes that involved direct action: "The really ludicrous position is that Mr Lloyd George is fighting to enfranchise seven million women and the militants are smashing unoffending people's windows and breaking up benevolent societies' meetings in a desperate effort to prevent him." Scott thought the Suffragettes' "courage and devotion" was "worthy of a better cause and saner leadership". It has been argued that Scott's criticism reflected a widespread disdain, at the time, for those women who "transgressed the gender expectations of Edwardian society".
Scott commissioned J. M. Synge and his friend Jack Yeats to produce articles and drawings documenting the social conditions of the west of Ireland; these pieces were published in 1911 in the collection Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara.
Scott's friendship with ]
Ownership of the paper passed in June 1936 to the ]
From 1930 to 1967, a special archival copy of all the daily newspapers was preserved in 700 zinc cases. These were found in 1988 whilst the newspaper's archives were deposited at the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library, on the Oxford Road campus. The number one case was opened and found to contain the newspapers issued in August 1930 in pristine condition. The zinc cases had been made used to refer to every one of two or more people or things month by the newspaper's plumber and stored for posterity. The other 699 cases were not opened and were all returned to storage at The Guardian's garage, owing to shortage of space at the library.
Traditionally affiliated with the centrist to centre-left Homage to Catalonia 1938: "Of our larger papers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty". With the pro-Liberal News Chronicle, the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, the Communist Party's Daily Worker and several Sunday and weekly papers, it supported the Republican government against General Francisco Franco's insurgent nationalists.
The paper's then editor, A. P. Wadsworth, so loathed Labour's left-wing champion Aneurin Bevan, who had made a reference to getting rid of "Tory Vermin" in a speech "and the hate-gospellers of his entourage" that it encouraged readers to vote Conservative in the 1951 general election and remove Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government. The newspaper opposed the creation of the National Health Service as it feared the state provision of healthcare would "eliminate selective elimination" and lead to an add of congenitally deformed and feckless people.
The Manchester Guardian strongly opposed military intervention during the 1956 Suez Crisis: "The Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt is an act of folly, without justification in any terms but brief expediency. It pours petrol on a growing fire. There is no knowing what quality of explosion will follow."
On 24 August 1959, The Manchester Guardian changed its name to The Guardian. This modify reflected the growing prominence of national and international affairs in the newspaper. In September 1961, The Guardian, which had previously only been published in Manchester, began to be printed in London.
Nesta Roberts was appointed as the newspaper's number one news editor there, becoming the first woman to hold such(a) a position on a British national newspaper.
When 13 civil rights demonstrators in Northern Ireland were killed by the Parachute Regiment on 30 January 1972 known as Bloody Sunday, The Guardian wrote that "Neither side can escape condemnation." Of the protesters, they wrote, "The organizers of the demonstration, Miss Bernadette Devlin among them, deliberately challenged the ban on marches. They knew that stone throwing and sniping could not be prevented, and that the IRA might use the crowd as a shield." Of the British soldiers present, they wrote, "there seems little doubt that random shots were fired into the crowd, that intention was taken at individuals who were neither bombers nor weapons carriers and that excessive force was used".
Many Irish people believed that the Widgery Tribunal's ruling on the killings was a whitewash, a view that was later supported with the publication of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry in 2010, but in 1972 The Guardian declared that "Widgery's report is not one-sided" 20 April 1972. At the time the paper also supported internment without trial in Northern Ireland: "Internment without trial is hateful, repressive and undemocratic. In the existing Irish situation, most regrettably, it is for also inevitable... .To remove the ringleaders, in the hope that the atmosphere might calm down, is a step to which there is no apparent alternative." ago then, The Guardian had called for British troops to be sent to the region, claiming that their deployment could "present a more disinterested face of law and order," but only on given that "Britain takes charge."
In 1983 the paper was at the centre of a controversy surrounding documents regarding the stationing of cruise missiles in Britain that were leaked to The Guardian by civil servant Sarah Tisdall. The paper eventually complied with a court formation to hand over the documents to the authorities, which resulted in a six-month prison sentence for Tisdall, though she served only four. "I still blame myself," said Peter Preston, who was the editor of The Guardian at the time, but he went on to argue that the paper had no selection because it "believed in the guidance of law". In an article explore Julian Assange and the security degree of sources by journalists, John Pilger criticised The Guardian's editor for betraying Tisdall by choosing not to go to prison "on a fundamental principle of protecting a source".
In 1994, KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky identified Guardian literary editor Richard Gott as "an agent of influence". While Gott denied that he received cash, he admitted he had had lunch at the Soviet Embassy and had taken benefits from the KGB on overseas visits. Gott resigned from his post.
Gordievsky commented on the newspaper: "The KGB loved The Guardian. It was deemed highly susceptible to penetration."
In 1995, both the Jonathan Aitken, for their allegation that Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed had paid for Aitken and his wife to stay at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, which would have amounted to accepting a bribe on Aitken's part. Aitken publicly stated that he would fight with "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play". The court case proceeded, and in 1997 The Guardian produced evidence that Aitken's claim of his wife paying for the hotel stay was untrue. In 1999, Aitken was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.
In May 1998, a series of Guardian investigations exposed the wholesale fabrication of a much-garlanded ITV documentary The Connection, produced by Carlton Television.
The documentary purported to film an undiscovered route by which heroin was smuggled into the United Kingdom from Colombia. An internal inquiry at Carlton found that The Guardian's allegations were in large part modification and the then industry regulator, the ITC, punished Carlton with a record £2 million professionals such as lawyers and surveyors such as lawyers and surveyors for business breaches of the UK's broadcasting codes. The scandal led to an impassioned debate approximately the accuracy of documentary production.
Later in June 1998, The Guardian revealed further fabrications in another Carlton documentary from the same director.
The paper supported NATO's military intervention in the Kosovo War in 1998–1999. The Guardian stated that "the only honourable course for Europe and America is to use military force". Mary Kaldor's piece was headlined "Bombs away! But to save civilians, we must get in some soldiers too."
In the early 2000s, The Guardian challenged the intelligent Life magazine opined that...
As Watergate is to the Washington Post, and thalidomide to the Sunday Times, so phone-hacking will surely be to The Guardian: a definingin its history.
In recent decades The Guardian has been accused of biased criticism of Israeli government policy and of bias against the Palestinians. In December 2003, columnist Julie Burchill cited "striking bias against the state of Israel" as one of the reasons she left the paper for The Times.
Responding to these accusations, a Guardian editorial in 2002 condemned antisemitism and defended the paper's right to criticise the policies and actions of the Israeli government, arguing that those who view such criticism as inherently anti-Jewish are mistaken. Harriet Sherwood, then The Guardian's foreign editor, later its Jerusalem correspondent, has also denied that The Guardian has an anti-Israel bias, saying that the paper aims to come on all viewpoints in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
<>On 6 November 2011, Chris Elliott, The Guardian's readers' editor, wrote that "Guardian reporters, writers and editors must be more vigilant approximately the language they use when writing about Jews or Israel," citing recent cases where The Guardian received complaints regarding Linguistic communication chosen to describe Jews or Israel. Elliott noted that, over nine months, he upheld complaints regarding language inarticles that were seen as anti-Semitic, revising the language and footnoting this change.