‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ So asked the Roman poet Juvenal, which can be rendered “Who will guard the guardians themselves?”
My BLOG “Thundering Liars” starred “THE TIMES” of London and the BLOG “Thundering Liars – Part 2 starred Titus Oates, both monstrous delinquents.
I would not put the The Guardian or the old Manchester Guardian in their league but I rarely read the current title and never, so far as I can remember, consulted the earlier title.
But the Manchester Guardian when the Bible of Nonconrformists ,could be a great humbug and today’s Guardian can be a very slippery customer
The Manchester Guardian lived by the wages of what it regarded as the wages of sin. Its principles ensured that it didn’t cover horse-racing or dog-racing. Financially it didn’t have a leg to stand on, much less four. But its stablemate The Manchester Evening News covered such vices and was highly profitable and kept the prim, proper and priggish morning paper apparently as immaculate as an Honest Woman, as understood in its day.
The late Malcolm Muggeridge was a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in the 1930s and wrote a novel which described two provincial English newspapers with such a relationship,
The wages of sin of the evening paper paid for lawyers to threaten a libel action, which the mere journalist Muggeridge could not afford to fight. The Manchester Guardian, doughty champion of free speech and enemy of censorship , aborted a troublesome publication.
Anne McHardy, who many years ago contributed with Lord Longford (author of the brilliant “Peace by Ordeal”), to a book on ULSTER, wrote an Obituary of Liam Cosgrave, describing him as the son of Ireland’s first elected Head of Government. It is difficult to accept that she is quite so ignorant. W.T. Cosgrave first served in an elected Irish Government in April 1919, when the Priomh Aire (First Minister), Eamon de Valera, appointed him, and next in January 1922, under Arthur Griffith.
In Novembr 2016 THE GUARDIAN published an on-line Obituary of the Sociology Lecturer/Professor Peter Taylor who had taught in Queen’s University Belfast and had many influential friends (none of them in the Nationalist or Republican community). The obituary did not mention Taylor’s long involvement in paedophilia and advocacy of it in articles and books. When Niall Meehan, Head of Journalism and Media Studies at Griffith College Dublin wrote to the obituarist, the obituary was not amended to give readers an honest account of the man’s life and career, but was deleted from the Guardian’s website.
Reading an excerpt from THE GUARDIAN’S obituary of Jeremy (“Paddy”) Ashdown I wrote a piece In his praise which I would not have written had I known the circumstances of his arrest of John Hume in August 1971. The IRISH TIMES on 5th January 2019 apparently echoed the Guardian.
Hugh Logue, who was arrested with John Hume, gave an account in a letter to THE IRISH TIMES (January 9 2019) of their ILLEGAL arrest and the violence employed by Ashdown and the Marines under his command at the time, and the QUASHING of the charges brought against himself and Hume.
Tom Cooper, a reliable commentator, also took issue with the obituary in the Irish Times.
I wish Jeremy Ashdown well, wherever he’s gone, and I pray my own readers’ forgiveness for basing a piece on the insupportable word of a Guardian Obituarist.
Perhaps, were he alive today, Juvenal would ask –“Who will guard us from THE GUARDIAN?”
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