The Guardian is generally a mildly left-ish, middle-class-ish kind of paper. I would say in the UK it tends to conjure up an image of a well-meaning, slightly naïve, hand-wringing sort of readership, though of course it’s base is likely wider than that.
What particularly makes it stand out is it has quite an open comments policy; it quite often publishes fairly ludicrous points of view from a variety of commentators. I’d say on the whole that’s quite a good thing, though it does tend to result in some absolutely preposterous headlines from time to time.
Somewhat ironically given today’s political climate there was a minor scandal in the mid 90s when a prominent Guardian journalist was found to have accepted money from the KGB [1]
To a Telegraph reader the Guardian looks very left wing (in british political terms) but it’s probably only about as left as Tony Blair, which is to say that it’s basically centerist.
Although usually mild-left, they sometimes publish articles which are pretty crazy-left.
Here's an example[1]: You have a university professor citing research saying that the 'acting white' phenomenon exists in integrated schools, plus her own black students tell her they suffered from the 'acting white' stigma. Yet she somehow concludes that belief in the phenomenon is not just wrong but 'intellectually dishonest'.
> You have a university professor citing research saying that the 'acting white' phenomenon exists in integrated schools
...in the course of arguing that it's image as a feature of all-black communities is false. (Integrated is very different from all-black.)
> plus her own black students tell her they suffered from the 'acting white' stigma.
What sdoes is relate that the “bullying essay” is a well-known archetype of freshman comp essay, and the common subtype of that type of essay she sees is one conforming to a particular form of the “acting white” narrative.
Freshman comp essays from people who don't have stories they want to share reflecting the author inserting themselves into narratives from the common folklore of their community instead of actual personal experience is a rather well-known phenomenon.
> It's also sometimes referred to as The Grauniad, as it has traditionally had the worst reputation of a UK newspaper for copy-editing.
This was mostly undeserved. Print newspapers have several printings each day, mostly with the same content. The early editions are less polished than the later ones. Because the Guardian was printed in Manchester, while the other major national papers were based in London, readers in the south would get the early mistake-ridden printing.
What particularly makes it stand out is it has quite an open comments policy; it quite often publishes fairly ludicrous points of view from a variety of commentators. I’d say on the whole that’s quite a good thing, though it does tend to result in some absolutely preposterous headlines from time to time.