On the very day Napoleon Bonaparte died, the 5th of May 1821, a group of cotton merchants in Manchester launched a newspaper that would eventually become one of the world's most influential publications. John Edward Taylor, a textile trader who had previously written scathing critiques of radical reformers, founded The Manchester Guardian with backing from a group known as the Little Circle. These non-conformist businessmen sought to create a voice for civil and religious liberty, yet their new paper would face immediate hostility from the working class. The Manchester and Salford Advertiser later branded The Manchester Guardian as a foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners, highlighting the deep class tensions that defined its early years. The paper's initial prospectus promised to zealously enforce principles of political economy without reference to party, but its editorial stance would remain complex and often contradictory regarding labor rights and social reform. In 1825, the paper merged with the British Volunteer, and by 1828, it was known as The Manchester Guardian and British Volunteer, a name that reflected its evolving identity in a rapidly industrializing city. The newspaper's early history was marked by a struggle to balance its liberal ideals with the economic realities of the cotton trade, which often put it at odds with the very workers it claimed to represent.
Slavery and Civil War Conflicts
The Manchester Guardian's stance on slavery and the American Civil War revealed a deep moral complexity that would haunt its reputation for decades. While the paper opposed slavery and supported free trade, it also argued that the Union's blockade of the Confederacy caused suffering in British towns, leading some to support the South. In 1861, shortly after the start of the American Civil War, the Manchester Guardian portrayed the Northern states as imposing a burdensome trade monopoly on the Confederate States, suggesting that if the South were freed to trade directly with Europe, slavery itself would cease. This hopeful view was shared by Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone, yet it drew sharp criticism from working-class Manchester, who held a meeting at the Free Trade Hall in 1862 to express their detestation of negro slavery and the attempt to organize a nation based on slavery. The newspaper reported the meeting and published a letter to President Abraham Lincoln, but also complained that the chief object of the meeting seemed to be to abuse The Manchester Guardian. Lincoln replied to the letter, thanking the workers for their sublime Christian heroism, and American ships delivered relief supplies to Britain. The paper's editorial stance on Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was critical, arguing that it stopped short of a full repudiation of slavery throughout the US. After Lincoln's assassination in 1865, the newspaper concluded that his rule was a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty, a view that today appears ill-judged and controversial. The paper's historical ties to the Atlantic slave trade through its founders' interests in Manchester's textile industry were later confirmed in an academic review commissioned by the Scott Trust in March 2023, revealing that John Edward Taylor and nine of his eleven backers had links to the slave trade.
C. P. Scott, who served as editor for 57 years from 1872, transformed The Manchester Guardian from a regional paper into a nationally recognized force. He became the paper's owner in 1907 when he bought it from the estate of Taylor's son, and under his leadership, the paper's moderate editorial line became more radical. Scott supported William Gladstone when the Liberals split in 1886 and opposed the Second Boer War against popular opinion. He was a strong advocate for women's suffrage, though he was critical of tactics by the suffragettes that involved direct action, stating that the really ludicrous position was that Mr Lloyd George was fighting to enfranchise seven million women while the militants were smashing unoffending people's windows. Scott's friendship with Chaim Weizmann played a role in the Balfour Declaration, and in 1948, The Manchester Guardian was a supporter of the new State of Israel. The paper's ownership passed in June 1936 to the Scott Trust, named after the last owner, John Russell Scott, who was the first chairman of the Trust. This move ensured the paper's independence, and from 1930 to 1967, a special archival copy of all the daily newspapers was preserved in 700 zinc cases. These cases were found in 1988 while the newspaper's archives were deposited at the University of Manchester's John Rylands University Library, on the Oxford Road campus. The first case was opened and found to contain the newspapers issued in August 1930 in pristine condition, but the other 699 cases were not opened and were all returned to storage at The Guardian's garage, owing to shortage of space at the library. Scott's legacy was one of editorial independence and a commitment to liberal values, which would become the cornerstone of the paper's identity for the next century.
The Troubles and Bloody Sunday
During the early period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, The Guardian supported British state intervention to quell disturbances between Irish Catholics and Ulster loyalists. After the 1969 Battle of the Bogside between Catholic residents of Derry and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), The Guardian called for the British Armed Forces to be deployed to the region, arguing that their deployment would present a more disinterested face of law and order than the RUC. The Army was deployed from 1969, and on the 30th of January 1972, troops from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment opened fire on a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march, killing fourteen people in an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. In response to the incident, The Guardian argued that neither side could escape condemnation, stating that the organizers of the demonstration, Miss Bernadette Devlin among them, deliberately challenged the ban on marches. The newspaper further stated that it was certainly true that the army cordons had endured a wanton barrage of stones, steel bars, and other missiles, but that still did not justify opening fire so freely. After the events of Bloody Sunday, John Widgery, Baron Widgery was appointed the head of a tribunal to investigate the killings. The resulting tribunal, known as the Widgery Tribunal, largely exonerated the actions of the soldiers involved in the incident. The Guardian published an article on the 20th of April 1972 which supported the tribunal and its findings, arguing that Widgery's report is not one-sided. In response to the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland, The Guardian argued that internment without trial is hateful, repressive and undemocratic, but in the existing Irish situation, most regrettably, it is also inevitable. The paper's stance on the Troubles reflected a complex balance between supporting the rule of law and condemning the use of force, a position that would be revisited and criticized in the decades that followed.
The Snowden Leaks and Government Pressure
In June 2013, The Guardian broke news of the secret collection of Verizon telephone records held by Barack Obama's administration and subsequently revealed the existence of the PRISM surveillance program after it was leaked to the paper by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Guardian said a DSMA-Notice had been sent to editors and journalists on the 7th of June after the first Guardian story about the Snowden documents, and it said the DSMA-Notice was being used as an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US. The newspaper was subsequently contacted by the British government's Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, under instruction from Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who ordered that the hard drives containing the information be destroyed. The Guardian offices were then visited in July 2013 by agents from the UK's GCHQ, who supervised the destruction of the hard drives containing information acquired from Snowden. The Guardian said it had destroyed the hard drives to avoid threatened legal action by the UK government that could have stopped it from reporting on US and British government surveillance contained in the documents. In June 2014, The Register reported that the information the government sought to suppress by destroying the hard drives related to the location of a beyond top secret internet monitoring base in Seeb, Oman, and the close involvement of BT and Cable & Wireless in intercepting internet communications. Julian Assange criticized the newspaper for not publishing the entirety of the content when it had the chance, and Rusbridger had initially covered the Snowden documents without the government's supervision, but subsequently sought it, and established an ongoing relationship with the Defence Ministry. The Guardian coverage of Snowden later continued because the information had already been copied outside the United Kingdom, earning the company's US website, The Guardian US, an American Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014. Rusbridger and subsequent chief editors would sit on the government's DSMA-Notice board, a move that would later be criticized by some as a compromise of journalistic independence.
The Julian Assange Controversy
The Guardian published the US diplomatic cables files and the Guantanamo Bay files in collaboration with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, but the relationship between the newspaper and Assange became increasingly strained. When some of the diplomatic cables were made available online in unredacted form, WikiLeaks blamed Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding for publishing the encryption key to the files in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. The Guardian blamed Assange for the release of the unredacted cables, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, a former contributor to The Guardian, accused The Guardian of publishing false claims about Assange in a report about an interview Assange gave to Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The Guardian article had claimed that Assange had praised Donald Trump and criticised Hillary Clinton and also alleged that Assange had long had a close relationship with the Putin regime. Greenwald wrote that this article was about how those Guardian false claims, fabrications really, were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people to consume false news. The Guardian later amended its article about Assange to remove the claim about his connection to the Russian government, but the damage was done. While Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy, The Guardian published a number of articles pushing the narrative that there was a link between Assange and the Russian government. In a November 2018 Guardian article, Luke Harding and Dan Collyns cited anonymous sources which stated that Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015, and 2016. The name of a third author, Fernando Villavicencio, was removed from the online version of the story soon after publication. The title of the story was originally Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, but a few hours after publication, sources say was added to the title, and the meeting became an apparent meeting. Manafort and Assange both said they had never met, with the latter threatening legal action against The Guardian. Ecuador's London consul Fidel Narváez, who had worked at Ecuador's embassy in London from 2010 to July 2018, said that Manafort had not visited Assange, and Serge Halimi said Harding had a personal grievance against Assange and stated that Manafort's name does not appear in the Ecuadorian embassy's visitors' book and there were no pictures of Manafort entering or leaving one of the most surveilled and filmed buildings on the planet. The Guardian has neither retracted nor apologised for the story about the meeting, and Stella Moris, Assange's wife, said The Guardian failed in its responsibility to Assange and its negligence has created such a problem that if Julian dies or is extradited, that will forever blot the reputation of the Guardian.
Financial Struggles and Digital Transformation
The Guardian was consistently loss-making until 2019, with the National Newspaper division of GMG reporting operating losses of £49.9 million in 2006, up from £18.6 million in 2005. The paper was therefore heavily dependent on cross-subsidisation from profitable companies within the group. The continual losses made by the National Newspaper division of the Guardian Media Group caused it to dispose of its Regional Media division by selling titles to competitor Trinity Mirror in March 2010. This included the flagship Manchester Evening News, and severed the historic link between that paper and The Guardian. The sale was to safeguard the future of The Guardian newspaper as is the intended purpose of the Scott Trust. In June 2011 Guardian News and Media revealed increased annual losses of £33 million and announced that it was looking to focus on its online edition for news coverage, leaving the print edition to contain more comments and features. For the three years up to June 2012, the paper lost £100,000 a day, which prompted Intelligent Life to question whether The Guardian could survive. Between 2007 and 2014 The Guardian Media Group sold all their side businesses, of regional papers and online portals for classifieds, and consolidated into The Guardian as sole product. The sales let them acquire a capital stock of £838.3 million as of July 2014, supposed to guarantee the independence of the Guardian in perpetuity. In the first year, the paper made more losses than predicted, and in January 2016 the publishers announced that The Guardian would cut 20 per cent of staff and costs within the next three years. The newspaper is rare in calling for direct contributions to deliver the independent journalism the world needs. The Guardian Media Group's 2018 annual report (year ending the 1st of April 2018) indicated significant changes. Its digital (online) editions accounted for over 50% of group revenues by that time; the loss from news and media operations was £18.6 million, 52% lower than during the prior year (2017: £38.9 million). The Group had cut costs by £19.1 million, partly by switching its print edition to the tabloid format. The Guardian Media Group's owner, the Scott Trust Endowment Fund, reported that its value at the time was £1.01 billion (2017: £1.03 billion). In the following financial report (for the year 2018, 2019), the group reported a profit (EBITDA) of £0.8 million before exceptional items, thus breaking even in 2019. To be sustainable, the annual subsidy must fall within the £25 million of interest returned on the investments from the Scott Trust Endowment Fund. In 2014, The Guardian launched a membership scheme. The scheme aims to reduce the financial losses incurred by The Guardian without introducing a paywall, thus maintaining open access to the website. Website readers can pay a monthly subscription, with three tiers available. As of 2018 this approach was considered successful, having brought more than 1 million subscriptions or donations, with the paper hoping to break even by April 2019. In 2016, the company established a US-based philanthropic arm to raise money from individuals and organisations including think tanks and corporate foundations. The grants are focused by the donors on particular issues. By the following year, the organisation had raised $1 million from the likes of Pierre Omidyar's Humanity United, the Skoll Foundation, and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to finance reporting on topics including modern-day slavery and climate change. The Guardian has stated that it has secured $6 million in multi-year funding commitments thus far. The new project developed from funding relationships which the paper already had with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates had given the organisation $5 million for its Global Development webpage. As of March 2020, the journal claims to be the first major global news organisation to institute an outright ban on taking money from companies that extract fossil fuels.
The Observer Sale and Future Challenges
In September 2024, The Guardian revealed it was in talks to sell The Observer to news website Tortoise Media. Journalists at Guardian Media Group passed a vote to condemn the sale and passed a vote of no confidence in the newspaper's owners, accusing it of betrayal amid concerns that the sale of the paper could harm the financial security of staff members. On the 6th of December 2024, it was announced that, despite 48 hours of strikes by journalists, the Observer deal with Tortoise was agreed in principle and would go ahead. The agreement included the Trust taking a significant stock position in the purchaser. The final sale price has not been disclosed. On the 18th of December 2024, Guardian Media and Tortoise Media closed the sale. A new Observer website was launched on the 25th of April 2025, and the first print edition under Tortoise appeared on the 27th of April 2025. The sale of The Observer marked a significant shift in the Guardian Media Group's strategy, as the paper had been a Sunday sister newspaper since 1993. The Guardian had acquired The Observer in June 1993, after a rival acquisition bid by The Independent was rejected. This extended the Guardian's publishing to 7 days a week. While the Observer continued to operate as a separate published newspaper with its own editorial team and journalists, over time its digital content became part of The Guardian's online presence. The Observer was sold to Tortoise Media, effective from April 2025, ending a 32-year relationship. The sale was part of a broader strategy to streamline operations and focus on the core Guardian brand, but it sparked intense debate among staff and readers about the future of the paper's independence and financial stability. The Guardian also announced in November 2023 that it would no longer post content on X, due to what it perceived as the overwhelming amount of misinformation, far-right conspiracy theories and racism on the social media platform, especially during the latest election. The Guardian said that readers would still be able to share articles on the platform and reporters would be able to continue using it for news-gathering purposes. In 2025, The Guardian, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, implemented a Secure Messaging feature in its mobile app to enable journalistic sources to communicate securely with the newspaper. Messaging is made indistinguishable from other data exchanged with millions of app users, so that not only the content of messages but the fact that messaging is taking place is hidden from investigators, to protect whistleblower sources who could be endangered if their communication becomes known to authorities. The source code has been published under the Apache License 2.0, with detailed information on its operation. These developments reflect the paper's ongoing struggle to balance financial sustainability with its commitment to journalistic integrity and independence in an increasingly digital and polarized media landscape.