Guido thought Charles Arthur’s Guardian piece on the Natwest meltdown yesterday looked familiar. The article bears a suspiciously close resemblance to a post published three hours earlier on tech website The Register. Arthur’s story claimed that a Guardian investigation had uncovered details of a key software component going wrong at the bank.  They say “investigative journalism”, Guido says reading it on the Internet…

The two articles even bear striking similarities in terms of structure, with the Arthur piece following The Register‘s story almost line by line. Lazy.

UPDATE: Former staff explain the decline in the Guardian Technology section:

@MediaGuido It all went downhill after @jackschofield left…—
Darryl Murphy (@darryljoemurphy) June 26, 2012

@darryljoemurphy @MediaGuido Well, Bobbie Johnson and @kevglobal also took voluntary redundancy; @RickWray and @KateBevan found other jobs.—
Jack Schofield (@jackschofield) June 26, 2012

@jackschofield @darryljoemurphy @MediaGuido @kevglobal @RickWray And none of us have been replaced. Fewer reporters = poorer coverage.—
Kate Bevan (@katebevan) June 26, 2012

@katebevan @jackschofield @MediaGuido @kevglobal @rickwray V good point. Decent stuff hard to do if a smaller team's always fighting fires—
Darryl Murphy (@darryljoemurphy) June 26, 2012

The Guardian‘s in-house phone hacker David Leigh has laughably claimed that he didn’t know hacking into people’s phones was against the law. Leigh told Press Gazette: ”at the time I was not conscious that it was a criminal offence. Since then it’s been made plain that it is a crime. I don’t like the idea of going about committing criminal offences, so I wouldn’t do it again for that reason“.

Regular Guido readers will remember that Leigh has previously admitted gaining a “voyeuristic thrill” from listening to private phone conversations. Given that Leigh has lied to Guido in the past, it might be advised to take his plea of ignorance with a large piece of salt. It’s also reassuring to know the only thing holding Leigh back from hacking phones again is that annoying little thing called the law…

The Guardian’s in-house phone hacker David Leigh will not be prosecuted, despite admitting in 2006 “I, too, once listened to the mobile phone messages”, writing about how hacking voicemails gave him a “voyeuristic thrill in hearing another person’s private messages”. Last summer Guido caught Leigh telling bare-faced lies about his phone hacking past, the details of which he shared with his journalism students. Incidentally Guido couldn’t find Salmond’s allegations that the Observer hacked his bank account in the in-depth coverage of the scandal in this morning’s paper. Move along people…

Alex Salmond has claimed that the Observer hacked his bank account in 1999, telling the Leveson Inquiry:

“I believe that my bank account was accessed by the Observer newspaper some time ago, in 1999 and my reason for believing that is I was informed by a former Observer journalist, who gave me a [inaudible] of what was in my bank account that could only be known to somebody who had seen it. For example, I had bought some toys for my then at that time young nieces in a toy shop in [inaudible] high street which was called Fun and Games, and the person who informed me told me that this caused great anticipation and hope in the Observer investigation unit because they believed that perhaps Fun and Games was more than a conventional toy shop. And enormous disappointment when it turned out to be just a toy shop. I have to say that on [that specific] high street, it seemed to me unlikely that it would be anything else, but anyway, the point I’m making is the person concerned had detail which could only have been known by somebody who had full access to my bank account at that stage.”

GMG have put out a short statement that does not deny the incident but asks, again, for more evidence.

“Mr Salmond first raised the matter of an alleged unauthorised access of his bank account with the Observer’s editor last year. The allegation was that a journalist working for the Observer had accessed his bank details in 1999. As we explained to him last year, on the basis of the information he had given us, we have been unable to find any evidence to substantiate his allegation. As our response to him at the time made clear, we take this allegation very seriously and if he is able to provide us with any more information we will investigate further.”

Awkward…

UPDATE: Co-conspirators in the comments said the BBC would ignore it, they’re right. So far, so ignored, points out the Sun’s political editor, Tom Neutron-Bomb:

@GuidoFawkes @tnewtondunn You may have noticed Salmond *was* covered on @itvnews in good measure(if u found our pre-footy bulletin at 19:15)—
Chris Ship (@chrisshipitv) June 13, 2012

Guardian Media Group is on the verge of flogging its radio business in a cut-price deal. GMG Radio, valued at £120 million, is set to be sold off to Global Radio for a paltry £50 million. Since GMG’s radio acquisitions over the past few years add up to over £200 million this represents a huge loss for the company. Now that’s a business plan.

The deal is the latest in a range of money-saving measures taken by the Guardian‘s parent company following losses for nearly £40 million last year. At the time GMG chief executive Andrew Miller warned that the business was running out of cash, instigating a wave of cutbacks across the board. GMG’s financial woes have been compounded by the poor performance of the Guardian newspaper, which languishes down in ninth in the league table of daily UK print circulation. While his company is tanking, Alan Rusbridger takes home over half a million per year…

The Guardian has a history of giving platforms to people with extremist views, but it sank to a new low today by running an op-ed from the terrorist leader of Hamas in Gaza. Apparently someone who advocates the persecution of women and gays as well as calling for the eradication of Israel, is just the man to write for a liberal-left newspaper.  CiF has received a barrage of angry tweets and cancelled subscriptions, whilst The Guardian is now being described as the most bigoted paper in Britain. Comment isn’t free, to victims of Hamas atrocities, it can cost you an arm and a leg…

When you are losing nearly a million pounds a week, desperate times call for desperate measures. As the Guardian splashes on how terrible the situation in Sri Lanka is, their paid-for supplement promotes the country’s tourist operation. A bit like slamming tax evasion from a building paid for by tax evasion eh…

Pic via Helen Lewis

While mentioning his race-baiting, tax avoidance and warning that if he wins he will be on “probation”, the Guardian has held its snooty nose and endorsed Ken. In an attempt to give some lukewarm covering fire today they claim that Boris has been using campaign office space donated by Lycamobile who have not paid corporation tax – a brave line of attack given Ken’s voodoo accounting.  Lycamobile did not pay tax because they haven’t made any profits yet. HRMC don’t tax companies on their losses. Which is lucky for the Guardian…

Guardian News & Media, which publishes the Guardian, doesn’t pay tax because it makes a loss every year. GNM is subsidised by its investment funds and its joint-ownership of AutoTrader. The joint-ownership is with, of course, a private equity firm. Some may consider the Guardian, on this basis, to be appalling hypocrites…

Given that their “bring a reader to work day” AKA “The Open Weekend” lost them £150,000, you would think the Guardian would take a time out from daft money-wasting ideas, but no. Having exhausted the free interns/slave labour market, GMG are moving to a new model where they will charge young wannabe hacks £9,000 to work there:

“The newspaper group, which made losses before tax of £33m last year, is understood to be set to launch a course offering training in digital journalism at a cost of £9,000 a head from September 2012.”

Guido is sure this will be just as successful as their mooted Guardian Hotel…

Not really sure what to make of the Guardian’s advert, the management seem very proud of it. Alan Rusbridger says it is about what they mean by “open news” as they move towards a mutual form of journalism. Meaning probably that they won’t pay for content, the HuffSlo Arianna model of slave-journalism is already mirrored over at Comment is Free (of charge). So many wannabees crave having Guardian bylines that they will write for free. Which is just as well, because that is probably the only way the Guardian is going to avoid bankruptcy.

In the newspaper’s reception they have put stuffed pigs staring at Guardian staff as they walk in:

Given the amount of hypocrisy at Kings Place in the building that is the HQ of left-of-centre hand-wringing; the hundreds of millions in offshore GMG corporate holdings in the Caymans tax haven, the half-a-million quid a year reward for failure paid to the editor of a loss-making paper that rails against high-pay, the columns from the multi-millionairess anti-poverty campaigner Polly Toynbee, the support for comprehensive schools from journalists who went to and send their children to private schools, it seems fair to quote Orwell to them:

“No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

After all, the Guardian’s pigs do walk on two legs…