Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

The Guardian

U.K. center-left (progressive/liberal), with a large U.S. edition

Owned byGuardian Media Group, which is wholly owned by the Scott Trust Limited. The Trust is a company set up to protect the paper's editorial and financial independence. It has no individual owner and pays no shareholder profits.
FundingA mix of reader payments (subscriptions and voluntary contributions, with no paywall), advertising, licensing, and returns from the Scott Trust endowment fund. The endowment was valued at about £1.24 billion in 2023. Philanthropic grants for specific reporting projects also contribute.
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

The Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian by John Edward Taylor. In 1936 it passed to the Scott Trust, which was created to keep the paper independent of commercial or political owners. The Trust was reorganized as a limited company in 2008, and Guardian Media Group is its operating arm. The paper moved to London in the 1960s and dropped 'Manchester' from its name in 1959. It has traditionally backed Labour and liberal causes, and its editorials usually back center-left positions. The Guardian expanded in the U.S. and Australia in the 2010s and adopted a reader-funded, free-to-read model rather than a paywall. It had over a million paying subscribers and regular contributors by the mid-2020s. Notable work includes the 2013 Edward Snowden NSA reporting (which shared a Pulitzer Prize for public service), the phone-hacking coverage, and the Paradise Papers. It has faced criticism from the right for a perceived liberal slant and from parts of the left over some opinion and editorial positions. It has also faced criticism over historic links of its founders to slavery, which the Scott Trust has acknowledged and responded to with a reparative program. Its U.S. coverage of Trump's second term has been generally adversarial, though its news reporting is separate from its opinion section.

Sources

  1. Guardian Media Group (Wikipedia)
  2. Scott Trust Limited (Wikipedia)
  3. The Guardian (Wikipedia)
  4. Guardian returns to revenue growth with 1.3m paying online readers (Press Gazette)

Profile compiled 2026-10-12; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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