The Guardian: debookmarked, never to be bought again.

Being of Mancunian origin, I have remained loyal to The Guardian, although in recent years it’s been a strain. After yesterday’s asinine coverage of the Liberal Democrat conference, I’m done. Not even the peerless cartoonist Steve Bell will persuade me back to their Guardian Unlimited site, or, especially, their paid for paper.

Here’s the straw in full, here’s the extract from vapid hackette Deborah Summers:

“Asked about PMQs, Sir Menzies said everyone was nervous before prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons, but Sandi insisted he didn’t make her nervous.

“Well, of course I’m a failure,” Sir Ming said.

It was a glib remark, but one that Sir Menzies will almost certainly come to regret.

A roar went up in the press room as he said it.”

And here’s the equally shallow report that followed it.

Now, I am not a slavish party member, they are for me the least worst option (in fact I don’t think I am one right now, my membership is a couple of months overdue) but this was just lazy mutual bumsniffing media pack behaviour at its worst - all the media have tried to do is to create a story where there isn’t one about the party leadership. Reservations yes (we leave cultish leadership worship to our sundered cousins in the Labour Party), a challenge no chance.

Personalities are far easier to talk about than policies. And vapid hacks and hackettes are for more comfortable with criticism and comment rather than serious policy analysis requiring experience and research or straight reporting. I have my own reasons for not trusting The Guardian: they defamed me when I worked for an MP. Their incorrect reporting was both in a news report and in a leader column. They could have checked their facts with one phone call or 200 yard walk and asked me directly, and when I confronted the journalist concerned (David Hencke) he blustered that ‘we can’t be expected to check everything we write about’. Oh? That’s not what I was told on my National Council for the Training of Journalists pre entry course.

I still continued to buy the paper but yesterday’s bilge has done for The Guardian. Dumped from bookmarks, RSS feed gone. The sales in this village weren’t too healthy anyway, now there’s one less.

Liberal Burblings says the Guardian wet themselves (he is too kind, their reporting was just a load of old piss), Liberal Democrat Voice says ‘The Guardian pathetic, just pathetic’. Quite. Update: Barcharters Anonymous wades through loads of the excrement (more than I would be prepared to) and yup, we should blame the messenger because the messenger in this case is largely making it up. It all adds pathology to the long, slow death of the newspaper.

Trees are good for making oxygen and for dogs to piss on, not for humans to make paper and smear with shit.