Under the headline “Guardian Media Group makes record revenues for news business” the Guardian reports that everything is tickety-boo at GMG plc, with total revenues reaching £264 million – which includes a staggering £82 million from 1 million paying supporters who respond to their begging pleas. Makes Guido think he is perhaps being too proud in resisting begging for donations from readers…
Away from the puff prose, the bottom line is that the paper lost £47.5 million before tax – a handy £31.8 million tax credit reduced that to a mere £15.7 million. The Scott Trust endowment of £1.2 billion, invested in such things as hedge funds and private equity, covered the shortfall. A note to the accounts emphasises – perhaps because of past highlighting by Guido – that the unnamed funds and fund managers are all UK tax residents.
Despite the paper losing money, editor Katharine Viner’s salary rose 3.5% from £509,850 to £527,694 – something the Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson wisely failed to report. The extra 18 grand should cover a summer holiday in Tuscany… cheers!
GNM chief executive Anna Bateson and Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner wrote to several women on Monday…
“We want to apologise for your experience of sexual harassment by an Observer member of staff, and for the way your complaint was handled.. Everyone should feel safe at work and in the presence of their colleagues, and the incident you describe is absolutely unacceptable.
We know you feel very badly let down by GNM and that you have not felt confident in speaking to the company in the past about what happened to you. We would like to understand what happened and to understand any failings on the company’s part.”
Guardian editor Kath Viner emails staff…
“I was working in the US when this happened, and as soon as I saw the cartoon on Saturday morning I decided with senior editors that we should remove it from our website and publish an apology. I know many colleagues were as shocked and upset as I was by the cartoon — there is no place for this type of image in the Guardian. The publication of this cartoon highlights failures in our editorial processes which we are determined to address. I am working with some of the senior editorial team on what those changes might be so that we can be sure that something like this won’t happen again.”
Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, writes…
“We are facing up to, and apologising for, the fact that our founder and those who funded him drew their wealth from a practice that was a crime against humanity. As we enter our third century as a news organisation, this awful history must reinforce our determination to use our journalism to expose racism, injustice and inequality, and to hold the powerful to account.”
In June 2020, at the height of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, Guido published an article about the Guardian’s own links to the slave trade. The story was soon followed up by the Mail, Sun and Telegraph. Echoing our call on the Guardian to pay reparations.
A year later, the Guardian issued a partial mea culpa, Guardian Admits Historic Support for the White Supremacist Confederacy, Still Covering Up Slavery Links Report. Today, however, the Scott Trust-commissioned investigation into whether there was any historical connection between slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, as well as the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation, is published. The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report confirms that Taylor, and at least nine of his eleven backers, had links to slavery through the cotton industry.
Ole Jacob Sunde, the chair of the Scott Trust, says:
“The Scott Trust is deeply sorry for the role John Edward Taylor and his backers played in the cotton trade. We recognise that apologising and sharing these facts transparently is only the first step in addressing the Guardian’s historical links to slavery. In response to the findings, the Scott Trust is committing to fund a restorative justice programme over the next decade, which will be designed and carried out in consultation with local and national communities in the US, Jamaica, the UK and elsewhere, centred on long-term initiatives and meaningful impact.”
Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian writes:
“We are facing up to, and apologising for, the fact that our founder and those who funded him drew their wealth from a practice that was a crime against humanity. As we enter our third century as a news organisation, this awful history must reinforce our determination to use our journalism to expose racism, injustice and inequality, and to hold the powerful to account.”
We would point that the £10 million in reparations is over 10 years. £1 million-a-year is 0.1% of their capital reserves. As the report makes clear, the profits that were used to fund the Guardian’s pro-confederacy propaganda were made on the backs of thousands of slaves.
N.B. Our original story was based on an unearthed 1962 history student’s thesis by Robert Allen Schellenberg of the University of Nebraska at Omaha “The Manchester Guardian and the American Civil War“. Unfortunately Schellenberg died in 2016 and did not live to see this day.
It’s not been plain sailing at The Guardian since Guido first brought the paper’s problematic past to light. The newspaper has sought to make amends for its slave trade links and Confederate sympathy – creating an editorial project and a podcast to investigate the issue. Careful what you wish for…
Short of a self-effacing exoneration for their troubled history, the podcasters realised The Guardian has failed to get with the times. Three producers from the show complained in writing about their treatment, before leaving the project. In a letter obtained by Deadline, the producers criticise a “lack of any serious desire from The Guardian to face and interrogate its own historic role” adding this left room for “microaggressions, colourism” and “bullying”. Their guidance on combatting microaggressions is clearly due a re-write.
The letter was as the paper looked for other black producers to fill the void of those quitting. In the wake of these new accusations of “institutional racism”, it’s worth asking again – surely The Guardian must fall…
Read the producers’ email in full below:
