All media have their biasses, their prejudices, and their methods of bending the truth. Nobody’s perfect. 

For a long time I thought that the treatment of Climate Change in centre-left media like the Guardian & the BBC was something unique. You could shrug off their biasses on other subjects; they were no worse than their rivals on the centre right. But the nonsense printed and broadcast about climate  was so exceptionally deranged that it seemed there was nothing you could do about it (apart from write about a thousand blog articles on the subject of course.)

This is no longer the case. There is now a large number of subjects on which the mainstream press cannot be trusted, or rather, can be trusted – to lie, or hide the truth. They include: Trump; Russia; the Ukraine war; election fraud; Trump; China; vaccines; Europe; Russian hypersonic missile technology; Trump; pyromanic Ukrainian male models; medical science; rocket science, and everything that’s not rocket science.      

I just read an article in the Guardian so weirdly afflicted by Trump Derangement Syndrome that I felt I had to find out more about the journalist. 

Newspapers are not neutral. They support certain policies, and naturally reproduce the opinions of politicians who propose those policies. They also discuss the views of academics and others who provide the expertise that underlies the policies, and recount the activities of activists who act in support of the policies. 

This article by one Rachel Leingang “The Democratic Superlawyer Trump Can’t Silence: ‘We are in the Break-Glass Moment of American History’” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/marc-elias-trump-democrats-retribution is a profile of Marc Elias, a lawyer who defends important politicians and the activists who support the policies proposed by the politicians that the paper supports. So instead of discussing policy, or the evidence for and against the policy, we’re discussing the lawyer who defends the activists who support the policy. It’s rather far away from anything you could call “news.”

You don’t have to read it. Here’s a sample quote:

Elias has for decades represented high-profile Democrats, including the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, and prominent liberal groups, including the Democratic National Committee. He hired the research group that investigated Trump’s ties to Russia in 2016, eventually becoming the Steele dossier.

Note how Clinton and Harris, who have been governing the USA for twelve of the past sixteen years, are described simply as  “high-profile Democrats”, and the Party in power for those twelve years has become a “prominent liberal group.” It’s as if, once you’re no longer in government, you become a Non-Governmental Organisation – like the National Trust, but more meanly treated.

Because in Rachel’s world, Harris, Clinton and the Democrat Party are the underdogs, harassed by a vindictive and vengeful President. She forgets to mention that, before some unknown Nobody tried to murder him, a lot of very important Somebodies in and out of the Democrat Party tried to put Trump in prison for the rest of his life.

As for putting Russiagate and the Steele Dossier into the CV of someone you’re writing a puff piece on, it makes you wonder whose side Rachel is on.      

Her profile on the Guardian website leaves us in no doubt though:https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rachel-leingang

Rachel Leingang is a democracy reporter focused on misinformation for Guardian US. 

She’s a prolific contributor to the paper, with 441 articles or blog contributions mentioned on her Guardian profile since 5 May 2023 – that’s nearly four per week.

What’s a “democracy reporter”? The Guardian explains the concept in an article called “About The Fight for Democracy – a Guardian series.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/04/about-the-fight-for-democracy-a-guardian-series

This series will shine a light on the attempts to undermine free and fair elections and efforts to deny certain communities full participation in the democratic process. This content is supported in part by philanthropic funding from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Park Foundation and theguardian.org

The Ford Foundation contributes to a huge range of projects combating inequality. On the first page of their grant list I found, for example, $200,000 to Grist Magazine described as:

Core support to expand the Local News Initiative, which embeds climate reporters in communities and at local news partners to report and write stories about the impact of climate and environmental changes, shared through local distribution networks.

[Grist Magazine specialises in tackling climate denial by defending “the science” against people like us. “Embedding climate reporters in communities” means lots of jobs for your friends.]

 Craig Newmark, founder of the Craiglist, is also into journalism, financing Mother Jones’s efforts to counter disinformation [insert smirking emoji]  and the Anti-Defamation League, an organisation which uses it considerable funds to shut down discourse that doesn’t share its peculiar ideas of what constitutes free speech. 

On the Park Foundation website, Mr Park boasts of how, having sold a cake mix company to Proctor & Gamble, he went on to acquire 177 media properties. His Foundation supports Democracy, Civic Participation, Media, Environment and Animal Welfare.

The Guardian proudly boasts that it doesn’t have a billionaire owner. It’s owned by a whole team of them.

There’s a further explanation of what constitutes democracy reporting in a tweet from Rachel’s colleague Dharna Noor:

The @guardian has launched a new series on democracy & justice, stoked to write on the threats the oil & gas industry (& the concentration of wealth and power) pose. Our first piece is on the future of protest by Rachelle [sic] Leingang, Adria R Walker and me.

In the first part of this joint article https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-activists-mass-protest Rachel Leingang laments the decline of mass protest: 

Prominent leftwing activists across the US say a second Trump administration demands new tactics to achieve their goals, amid expectations the huge protests that marked both the Biden and first Trump presidencies won’t materialize in the same way… “The novelty of mass mobilization has kind of worn off,” said Jamie Margolin, who previously led climate group Zero Hour.”

Curiously embedded in her article is this statement:

This story is part of a new Guardian US ongoing series, Democracy and Justice, that reports on people and communities affected by threats to democracy, with a focus on climate and racial justice. Are the voices of ordinary people being heard – or do those of the wealthy or powerful hold sway?

Well, we know the answer to that one. At the Guardian billionaires – living and dead – who used to manufacture cars, computer software & cake mixes now get to manufacture consent.

Thereafter there’s a section on “the Next Stage of the Climate Movement” and one on “Exhaustion and Energy in the Racial Justice Movement.”

On climate, Ms Noor summarises the opinions of leaders of the climate movement:

  “The climate protest movement .. will use a wider array of tactics, including more targeted actions…The novelty of mass mobilization has kind of worn off … when it becomes routine, it can start to feel like pageantry…Americans’ appetite for mass rallies seems to have dissipated..The movement hasn’t recovered.”

Which is why the focus is changing to “more targeted actions…when we stand up and disrupt business as usual..” and “actions in which small groups disrupt powerful people’s speeches.” But also “more boring strategies.. such as filing legal challenges to environmental rollbacks and working to advance local policies and climate lawsuits.”

So there you have it. Disrupting “business as usual” and “powerful people’s speeches” is now one arm of climate activism, the other one being “climate lawsuits” and “legal challenges.”

Which brings us back to Rachel Leingang and her praise of the lawyer who says: “We are in the break-glass moment of American history when it comes to free and fair elections and democracy.”

Breaking glass rather suggests the Black Lives Matter method of protest, which is praised in the third part of the Guardian article on the decline of mass protest, but I think Marc Elias means the “break glass” notice you get on those boxes that hold fire extinguishers.

What – or who – Mr Elias and the Guardian want to extinguish is a bit vague, except that it includes “business as usual” and “powerful people’s speeches.” There are more radical ways of disrupting powerful people’s speeches of course, as we’ve seen recently, but I’d watch out when they start spraying that dry CO2 about.