Who Are Newspapers For?

The question has two meanings: what are the "market segments" for which a particular title is designed; and who in society does the paper support and advocate for? This week's announcement that the Guardian Media Group is going to lay off staff and reduce its output due to plummeting revenue has produced some predictable schadenfreude on the left, where anger remains over the group's role in the undermining of Jeremy Corbyn since 2015 and the defeat of Labour last December. It has also produced some notable justifications in response from the better-known staff on the Guardian and Observer. I'm not going to spend any more time than is necessary on the likes of Nick Cohen and Hadley Freeman scolding the left and insisting that good quality journalism must be paid for as the only alternative is "fake news". Both are columnists whose role is to stimulate rage-clicks in the era of social media through confected offence and trite opinions. Of more interest is the defence mounted by George Monbiot, who whatever his flaws (pomposity, piousness, a lack of wit) is probably sincere.

Monbiot's position is that the Guardian offers plurality, which he interprets as "greater reach and impact, and a discussion, not a sermon" (coming from his eminence, that last bit is nothing if not ironic). He ties this quality to the paper's ownership model: "The ownership issue is crucial. Most newspapers are owned by billionaires or multimillionaires. They are, as a class, not neutral. They want a world that's good for people like them. Less tax, less regulation, fewer workers rights and trade unions. They use their papers to get it". This is a genuinely odd claim in defence of the Guardian. The paper was founded by anti-radical rich businessmen, controlled by the Taylor & Scott families for most of its history, and the Scott Trust was established in the 1930s to avoid death duties. It isn't that different in its origins and history to the rest of the British press, even if avoiding being bought up by a multimillionaire in the last forty years has left it looking unusual. Monbiot's suggestion that the paper has a different class perspective leaves hanging the question of what that perspective is. If it doesn't reflect the interests of billionaires today, whose interests does it reflect?

The Guardian's history is no secret. What stands out is its consistent reluctance to embrace progressive causes until the last possible moment. It criticised the Peterloo reformers as dangerous agitators, it was sympathetic to the South in the US Civil War (largely because of its commitment to free trade), it opposed militant suffragettes and Irish nationalists, and it opposed the creation of the NHS. This last was partly because of its antipathy towards the left, in the form of Aneurin Bevan (it even went so far as to advocate a vote for the Conservatives in 1951), but also because it saw itself representing the interests of doctors and other professionals who benefited from the existing healthcare system. It has rarely been sympathetic to organised labour (it responded to the 1926 general strike by setting up a no-strike in-house pet union) and its support for social reforms has, contrary to the myths, been cautious & peevish (its current approach towards the transexual rights movement and its gender-critical opponents is typical: conflicting sermons rather than discussion).

Its commitment to plurality and balance has tended to bias in a pro-capital, pro-Atlanticist direction. It argued for the abolition of slavery, but also argued for the full compensation of slave-owners. It has wrung its hands over Palestine but was consistently Zionist up till the Second World War and pro-Israel after 1948. It opposed the Suez adventure but has backed (albeit sometimes reluctantly) most wars of choice since 1989. When pressured by the state over leaks and sources, it has usually caved-in. Its political endorsement during general elections has tended to oscillate between Labour and the Liberals (except when it sits on the fence and advocates anti-Tory tactical voting), but enthusiasm for the former has tended to correlate with how centrist the leadership is. It was a prime backer of the SDP and New Labour and is currently giving its all to Keir Starmer. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Guardian's stance has remained consistent - bourgeois, managerialist, metropolitan - while the political landscape has shifted around it. It is therefore relatively easy to say who the paper supports and advocates for in society. It is the professionals and managers of liberal capitalism and the associated institutions of the para-state, from the BBC to the National Theatre.

The paper's problem is the other question: who is the paper trying to serve? Monbiot talks of "greater reach and impact" as if it were a public good but it is really just a commercial strategy. In recent years the paper has commited to a free-to-view digital model augmented by various subscriber add-ons and subsidiary earners, from lectures by staff (a comical example of its pedagogic pretensions) to a dating site for the like-minded (already shutdown this year). This has created a number of tensions. The need for eyeballs to drive advertising revenue has led the paper to invest heavily in star writers, but this has also encouraged performative controversy (columnists like Suzanne Moore and Nick Cohen applauding their own bravery while insulting much of the readership) and a tendency to the lazy and meretricious (John Crace, Barney Ronay and Marina Hyde). It has also tried to expand into the United States and Australia, but this has simply increased costs across the board. More and more of its reporting now relies on agencies and freelancers, which limits its ability to develop complex stories over longer time periods and relationships with primary sources.

Its Anglosphere ambitions have not required any change in its political stance, but it has irritated British readers (and not just the parochial ones) through excessive Americanophilia (Hadley Freeman) and the promotion of a blander, internationalist liberalism that sets the limits of the possible some way short of UK practice (e.g. healthcare). In some ways this echoes the paper's previous deracination when it relocated from Manchester to the metropolis. Its attempts to tend to its Northern roots through John Harris's prole safaris or the vox-pops of Helen Pidd have become more ridiculous with the passing years, but this isn't simply a case of forgetting it's origins. Detailed reports on Egypt or India found an eager readership in Manchester in 1890 because cotton was still king. The paper now has little to say to the "Red Wall" and regards its denizens as mere spear-carriers in a factional play about the struggle for the soul of the Labour party. Its target audience in the North is the educated classes of Hebden Bridge, who are assumed to share the same cultural capital and material interests as their equivalents in Weybridge. Its bafflement and contempt for leave voters during the Brexit saga reflected a wider impatience with the country. It's sympathy for working class British culture, outside of the commoditised form of new music and film, is largely limited now to the cartoons of Steve Bell and David Squires.

It may be increasingly antique in an era of media bricolage, but many people still imagine they have a relationship with a particular newspaper and that it reflects well on themselves because of the assumed affinity with ideals such as fairness and tolerance. The Guardian's naked antipathy towards Jeremy Corbyn led to disappointment and a sense of betrayal among many readers (and not just Corbyn supporters) because it undermined that affinity. This isn't simple narcissism on the part of those readers but an asymmetric emotional investment. Indeed, the charge of narcissism is perhaps better levelled at the paper itself. The structural trend away from reporting to opinion means that the "voice" of the press is increasingly self-absorbed and intemperate in general, but what the last four years have shown is how little regard the Guardian in particular has for a large part of its own readership, a disregard that is now being repaid in kind. This is not just a case of the paper revealing its "true face" once more, but a consequence of its attempt to become the international standard-bearer of liberal capitalism.

Many media folk have made the point that the people who will lose their jobs at the Guardian aren't the annoying columnists but reporters and the non-bylined, but very few of them have noted that the result will be an even more elite, privileged workforce. That in turn means that further revolts by GMG staff against the more egregious columnist rants (such as the letter criticising Suzanne Moore's stance on trans rights) will be less likely. The trajectory of the Guardian now seems clear. Shorn of it auxiliary cultural products, the paper's embeddedness in the metropolitan liberal milieu will now become weaker, matching its cultural retreat from the rest of the UK since the 1980s. Simultaneously, its commitment to becoming an international platform that offers a funkier vibe slightly to the left of the New York Times means that its reporting will become more fragmented and shallow while its opinion will become more shrill and solipsistic. It's not a pretty picture and blaming the left for its current travails is just a taste of what is to come.