The Guardian
The Guardian (formerly known as The Manchester Guardian) is a British national daily newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. Founded in 1821, it is unique among major British daily newspapers in being owned by a foundation (the Scott Trust, via the Guardian Media Group). It is known for its left-of-centre political stance. At the 2010 election it supported the Liberal Democrats.
The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 283,063 copies in March 2010, behind The Daily Telegraph and The Times, but ahead of The Independent. The website, guardian.co.uk, is one of the highest-traffic English-language news websites. According to its editor, The Guardian has the second largest online readership of any English-language newspaper in the world, after the New York Times.
The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, contains articles from The Guardian and its sister Sunday paper The Observer, as well as reports, features and book reviews from The Washington Post and articles translated from Le Monde.
Founded by textile traders and merchants, The Guardian had a reputation as "an organ of the middle class", or in the words of C.P. Scott's son Ted "a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last".[ "I write for the Guardian," said Sir Max Hastings in 2005, "because it is read by the new establishment", reflecting the paper's then growing influence.
The paper's readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion: a MORI poll taken between April and June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters; according to another MORI poll taken in 2005, 48% of Guardian readers were Labour voters and 34% Liberal Democrat voters. The newspaper's reputation as a platform for liberal and left-wing opinions has led to the use of the epithet "Guardian reader" as a label for people holding such views.
Guardian features editor Ian Katz stated in 2004 that "it is no secret we are a centre-left newspaper". In 2008, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley said that editorial contributors were a mix of "right-of-centre libertarians, greens, Blairites, Brownites, Labourite but less enthusiastic Brownites, etc" and that the newspaper was "clearly left of centre and vaguely progressive". She also said that "you can be absolutely certain that come the next general election, The Guardian's stance will not be dictated by the editor, still less any foreign proprietor (it helps that there isn't one) but will be the result of vigorous debate within the paper." The paper's comment and opinion pages, though often written by centre-left academics and writers like Polly Toynbee, have allowed some space for right-of-centre voices such as Simon Jenkins, Max Hastings and Michael Gove.
In the run-up to the 2010 general election, following a meeting of the editorial staff, the paper declared its support for the Liberal Democrats, in particular due to the party's stance on electoral reform. The paper suggested tactical voting to prevent a Conservative victory, given the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system.
