THE GUARDIAN: The Guardian, propped up by a car magazine, faces going out of print after warning of a cash crisis and the threat of more redundancies.
When The Guardian celebrated its centenary in 1921, its most revered editor, Charles Prestwich Scott, summed up his newspaper's values in an essay that is still quoted on its website every day.
"Comment is free," he wrote, "but facts are sacred." Scott, who devoted his entire working life to The Guardian, including 57 years as editor, was a Liberal MP who believed newspapers fulfilled a "higher function" than simply striving for "profit or power".
But Scott, who also owned The Guardian for 22 years, was a pragmatist, too, and stressed in the same essay that a newspaper "is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live".
What he would have made of the financial mess his successors have allowed his beloved publication to get into is anyone's guess. » | Gordon Raynor, Chief Reporter | Saturday, June 18, 2011
