MEDIA WATCH | THE GUARDIAN

The Guardian—The World’s Leading Bigoted Voice

I would expect to find your brand of “humor” on a white supremacist blog, not on a platform for enlightened journalism–or at least one which seeks to masquerade as such.

January 10, 2020

Katharine Viner
Editor-in-Chief, The Guardian
Kings Place
90 York Way
London, N1 9GU
United Kingdom

Dear Ms. Viner,

Bigotry is alive and well in the pages of The Guardian, “the world’s leading liberal voice.”

Please give Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus a visit and you will see that every adjective that can be used to describe what you have just published is an antonym for “liberal.”

In a world where anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and hate crimes are on a disgraceful and appalling rise, you are proudly parading content promoting the values and attitudes any decent human being the world over is outraged by at this very moment. I would expect to find your brand of “humor” on a white supremacist blog, not on a platform for enlightened journalism–or at least one which seeks to masquerade as such.

Are you really okay with your featured writers and artists doing the equivalent of quoting Nazis on their “thoughts” about Jews? Or getting members of the KKK to provide their “input” on African Americans? You have gone, for your pathetic excuse for “information,” to those who couldn’t know less about Scientology, and who have made a full-time job out of hating it. These are individuals who seek to make a profit off of the promotion of hate crime—the only thing they have done successfully over the last two years, inspiring more than 600 threats or acts of violence against the Church of Scientology and its members—honest, productive contributing members of society whose lives you condone endangering.

To make matters worse, you have the indecency to “acknowledge” a well-known advocate of sex and human trafficking, Tony Ortega, and to express appreciation for his “reporting.” Ortega has never done a day of reporting in his life—on the contrary he has disgraced, disappointed and violated the values of every publication he worked for.

But most despicable of all is the fact that you wouldn’t dream of pulling the intolerant stunt you just pulled with any other faith—not Judaism, not Islam, not Christianity, Sikhism or any other—revealing the fact that your publication clearly stands for nothing, and picks and chooses what it is “liberal” about, caring about its world and the people in it when and as it sees fit, and when and as this doesn’t cut across its quest for profit.

Yes, we all know your readership is tanking. But we did not expect you to stoop this low.

It is unacceptable.

Sincerely,

Edward Parkin