I saw through it in 1819 so ner Archived Message
Posted by Ian M on October 4, 2020, 10:35 am, in reply to "Re: I'm no genius but I saw through it in the 70s....nm"
'1. The Guardian and Peterloo Celebrating the 50 000th edition of the Guardian, today’s editor Alan Rusbridger linked the paper to the outrage over the Peterloo Massacre of reformers at St. Peter’s Fields in 1819, which the first editor, John Taylor ‘helped to make a national scandal’. In fact, the Manchester Guardian was founded to defeat the radical reform movement in words, as the Cavalry had in deeds. Eleven people were killed and 500 injured when mounted police charged the reform meeting in Manchester and John Taylor did cover the hearings in the new Manchester Guardian. But Taylor was no supporter of the reform movement. Of the reform leaders Taylor wrote scathingly in the Manchester Gazette ‘they have appealed not to the reason but the passions and the suffering of their abused and credulous fellow-countrymen, from whose ill-requited industry they extort for themselves the means of a plentiful and comfortable existence. “The do not toil, nether do they spin,” but they live better than those that do.’ (Manchester Gazette, 7 August 1819, in Ayerst, The Guardian, 1971, p.20) Pointedly, Taylor never used the inflammatory word ‘Peterloo’, except in a footnote, and even then in quotation marks; and he refused to use the word ‘massacre’, preferring the more neutral ‘tragedy’ (Ayerst, p.19). The dramatic catchword Peterloo was coined by The Manchester Observer described by a Home Office report as ‘the organ of the lower classes’ designed to ‘inflame their minds’. The Manchester Observer was closed by the crippling cost of police prosecutions (Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians, 1974, p.53). Two months later a group of Manchester textile merchants grabbed the opportunity to take the political initiative out of the streets. Eleven subscribed £100 each (around £6,800 in today’s money) to start Taylor’s paper. In its prospectus, the Manchester Guardian promised to promote the ‘just principles of Political Economy’. The intended readership was ‘amongst the classes to whom, more especially, Advertisements are generally addressed’. Such people would value ‘the commercial connections and knowledge of the conductors of the Guardian’ (Ayerst, p. 23-4). The Manchester Guardian paid the stamp duty, putting it, at seven pence an issue, beyond the pockets of working people. Real radicals challenged the stamp duty, publishing papers that flouted the law, like Henry Hetherington’s, launched in 1830 and pointedly titled The Poor Man’s Guardian. The Manchester Guardian attacked rival papers that evaded the stamp duty. The working class Manchester and Salford Advertiser dubbed the Guardian ‘the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners’ (21 May 1836).' - https://neo-jacobins.blogspot.com/2007/09/neo-jacobin-special-against-guardian.html (Sorry for delayed witticism - been away for the week!) I
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