The Guardian of Moral Standards?

On June 2, after Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle’s spectacular slump (apologies!) to defeat in BGT, and subsequent frontpage based MELTDOWN, The Guardian showed its moral superiority to just about every media outlet on the planet. Informing us ‘ITV in the spotlight after ‘exhausted’ Susan Boyle checks into private clinic’ The Guardian was critical of the fact that Boyle had not been ‘psychologically tested’ by Talkback Thames, the production company.

On the same day in an article titled ‘Who’s to blame for Boyle’s distress?’, The Guardian pontificated (via Linda Blair) ‘it’s easy to pick on the media or the shows’ producers, but in my opinion a large part of the responsibility lies with us, the general public.’ Don’t shoot the messenger eh?

Nowhere in either article on Boyle’s breakdown is it mentioned that a search of ‘Susan Boyle’ on The Guardian website brings up 84 articles in the last 30 days, including:

· May 29, ‘Susan Boyle ‘under pressure’ before Britain’s Got Talent final’
· May 29, ‘Susan Boyle dreamed a dream, now TV stress has become her nightmare’
· June 1, ‘The Susan Boyle freakshow’
· June 1, ‘The media can’t diagnose Susan Boyle – and we shouldn’t try’
· June 3, ‘Britain’s Got Talent: fewer than 20 complaints over Susan Boyle’ (so that’s ok then)
· June 3, ‘Susan Boyle: press warned to back of Britain’s Got Talent star’

Continuing this theme, The Guardian showed its questionable moral fibre in its reporting the death of David Carradine. Intrusion into grief or shock (or the avoidance of) is part of the press code and surely the desire of any decent, human reporter, http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/day/code/codeindex.shtml




so how leaving it till line 5 before the how, where and when of his death was at best horribly insensitive – you can read the details easily yourselves. The story was posted at 15:14 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/04/david-carradine.

Not content with running the story next to a fun hangman game running on a loop (this is a constantly changing advert space, so keep refreshing), a comment section rapidly filled with shocking off colour remarks. On unmoderated forums, anything goes, but The Guardian?!? Some took over 30 mins to take down, or were requoted later in the threads. Despite the ever increasing number of awful comments, readers were told by moderators at 4:24pm that it was good to have some sort of tribute forum, presumably leaving the readers to wonder what forum the moderators were referring to. At 4:36 the moderators closed the comments.

At 18:58 the story was reposted here without a comments section, just a more respectful web address http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/04/david-carradine-kungfu-dead.

Update 1 - On June 4 Polly Toynbee, in writing about James Purnell's resignation, used the opening metaphor 'Another engine breaks away from Gordon Brown's fuselage, and the damage done looks set to bring him crashing out of the sky.'