GUardian mission

The Editor of the GRaun links to the Peterloo bicentenary to restate her and her organ's values:

The first edition was published on 5 May 1821, devoted to enlightenment values, liberty, reform and justice....Scott turned the newspaper into “the dominant expression of radical thinking among educated men and women”...The first manifesto was]...a wholly uncynical and unsnobbish document. It is on people’s side....Scott introduced the famous phrase “comment is free, but facts are sacred”, and decreed that “the voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard”. It was here that he laid out the values of the Guardian: honesty, cleanness, integrity, courage, fairness, a sense of duty to the reader and a sense of duty to the community.

The Graun varied in terms of how it saw it's values, unsurprisingly -- working ideology normally bridges the gap with policy. Viner reminds us -- 

the paper demanded that the Manchester cotton workers who starved in the streets because they refused to touch cotton picked by American slaves should be forced back into work...[influenced too much by advertisers apparently.  [However]...Scott campaigned for self-government in Ireland...The Guardian stood against [Boer War 2]  and ran a campaign for peace, while the brilliant Guardian reporter Emily Hobhouse exposed the concentration camps for the Boers run by the British....[Nevertheless]...the Manchester Guardian disparaged the foundation of Britain’s National Health Service. While supporting the changes as a “great step forward”, the Guardian feared that the state providing welfare “risks an increase in the proportion of the less gifted”.[The editor at the time] AP Wadsworth, loathed Nye Bevan

Viner is no CP Scott and goes with something woollier than a manifesto

After working at the Guardian for two decades, I feel I know instinctively why it exists. Most of our journalists and our readers do, too – it’s something to do with holding power to account, and upholding liberal values...journalists must work to earn the trust of those they aim to serve. And we must make ourselves more representative of the societies we aim to represent. Members of the media are increasingly drawn from the same, privileged sector of society: this problem has actually worsened in recent decades

championing the public interest – which has always been at the heart of the Guardian’s mission – has become an urgent necessity. [Naturally, public interest leads to about as close as the Graun can get to neutrality with this:]...the Brexit referendum...leaves Britain facing a deeply uncertain future

And it ends,eventually with this:

More than 800,000 readers now help fund the Guardian. Join them.


It's very long, and quite good really... Meanwhile the lofty standards to which it aspires in the public interests are demonstrated in the Weekend section:

Blind date: ‘We talked about our best vomit stories’