More Guardian hypocrisy surfaces

Journalist Iain Hepburn writes the False Doorway blog.  He has been ploughing a lonely furrow of his own concerning the dubious activities of another part of the Guardian News & Media (GNM).

His efforts in chasing down an explanation from the Observer’s owners about breaches of data protection rules through ‘blagging’ by that paper have resulted in a response from GNM’s Managing Editor.   As Iain explains on his blog:

Regular readers of False Doorway may well remember a piece I did a few weeks ago, at the height of the phone hacking scandal, challenging Guardian News and Media to explain the breaches of data protection rules cited with regards to the Observer by the Information Commissioner in the What Price Privacy Now report, and then-editor Roger Alton’s admissions in the aftermath of the matter.

Without any sense of irony, the response Iain received yet again underlines the utter hypocrisy at the heart of the core business of the Guardian Media Group. One rule for the Guardian stable of papers, one for everyone else.  Read GNM’s response in full and Iain’s assessment of it on False Doorway.

Strange how GNM always rediscovers a sense of propriety when asked to comment about its own wrongdoing.  So much for the values of CP Scott that GMG parades on its website.  Values more honoured in the breach than the observance, clearly.

Away with the fairies

That is probably the most polite description we can come up with for the Observer’s editorial staff.  Casting its eyes across the Irish Sea, the Observer uses its editorial today to opine:

The Irish people have suffered enough. Europe should back off

The new government in Dublin deserves a supportive EU, not a punitive one

Since when has there ever been in history a centralising, power hungry, unaccountable entity that was benevolent and supportive?  Since when has any entity stuffed to the gills with special interests, and dedicated to furthering the objectives of their barely visible establishment friends in the big corporations, ever undermined those interests?

The sentiments of the Observer demonstrate that its editorial team is either in complete denial of the reality of EU governance and the consequences of an all powerful state, or is deliberately deceiving its tiny readership with naked propaganda. The editorial says:

The Irish have delivered a savage verdict on those who turned their country from the envy of the world into an object of pity. In the process, they have smashed one of Europe’s great political machines, the Fianna Fáil party that enjoyed a near monopoly of power since 1932. This is a striking example of democracy at work.

But does it matter? Voters damned Fianna Fáil’s disastrous decision to underwrite the staggering losses of grotesquely reckless banks. They are, however, stuck with those same policies in the shape of the deal made with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. It ties the new government into ever-more brutal austerity for at least the next four years, while continuing to lavish public money on insolvent banks.

It is all so confused it is difficult to know what on earth the Observer is trying to say. It seems to want to have its cake and eat it. The Observer lauds a ‘striking example of democracy at work’ on Ireland, but it believes totally in government by the anti democratic European Union.  It refers to the ‘disastrous decision to underwrite the staggering losses of grotesquely reckless banks’, yet supported and pressed for the bail out of the banks with public money. It criticises the IMF and EU’s conditions for bailing out Ireland, yet ideologically supports such unaccountable internationalist bodies possessing such political and financial power to the detriment of nation states.  There is more in the same vein.

Surely the only conclusion any reasonable person can come to is that like so many in the media, the Observer is in utter denial, it is disconnected from reality, it is away with the fairies.