Thread by @simonjedge

Debate rages on both sides of the Atlantic about the editorial values of the Guardian. It's that kind of publication nowadays, setting the agenda internationally. What a departure this is from most of its history, when it was the poor relation of British broadsheets.

I started reading the 'Grauniad' in the 80s, when it was still famous for its misprints. Guardian readers were a tribe, although we didn't use that word then. Like all the media, the Guardian was vile on lesbian and gay issues, but otherwise it was my spiritual home.

In the mid-80s the Independent came along, but as a reader I never defected. Back then, the Indy was much more suity and centrist – it took its name seriously – whereas the Guardian was unashamedly of the left.

When I started working for newspapers in the late 90s, I was grateful for any job. (I got one at the Evening Standard.) But colleagues looked down on the Guardian. It paid much less than other papers and was regarded by other journalists as an eccentric backwater.

Then came the internet. Alan Rusbridger, the long-serving editor of the Guardian, was an early adopter. He thought digital was the future of newspapers long before anyone else did and he pioneered the model of putting the entire paper online for free.

Other media bosses thought this was nuts. Newspapers cost a fortune to put together, and giving them away free was reckless, since it was by no means clear that digital advertising would make up for the lost revenue of print sales and advertising.

But the media has a herd mentality. The Guardian suddenly looked modern and forward-thinking and its rivals didn't want to look like dinosaurs. So they made their content free as well. This was, after all, the approach of the tech giants: innovate now, monetise later.

The Guardian invested massively and its content was good, updating all through the day – which was a big deal back then. When Labour peer Lord Hollick sold Express Newspapers to Richard Desmond, the editor (Rosie Boycott) was as much in the dark as the rest of the staff...

I have a vivid memory of the entire staff, including Rosie, checking Media Guardian all day to find out what our bosses were doing with our papers and our jobs. That was quite a coup for the Guardian – and other journalists stopped looking down their noses at it.

Rusbridger continued to spend, spend, spend. He ran up huge bills and for a while it looked like he'd gone too far. In the end, a voluntary subscription, introduced by his successor, saved the day. Many loyal readers were prepared to pay for content that was free anyway.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before that, the Guardian had another wheeze. It had successfully established a free-to-read model for the UK media (leading to a collapse in UK newspaper revenues and jobs) but other English-speaking territories hadn't gone down that route.

In North America and Aus/NZ, the established newspapers all charged a subscription for online content. For readers, who had always paid money for a print paper, that was perfectly normal. Why should any newspaper give content away for free?

For the Guardian, that presented an opportunity: since the internet wasn't restricted by national boundaries, why not beef up the bureaux in the US, Canada, Australia and NZ, rebrand as a global paper, and undercut the existing media by offering a fee alternative?

Trying to take on giants like the New York Times on their own turf was a bold move, but free content is free content, and there was an entire generation of readers, without any established newspaper-buying habit, to nurture.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and the paper that was once a bit of a joke in the UK is now a global behemoth – a universally recognised brand that gets regularly name-checked in Hollywood movies, with no need for introduction.

In this country, ex-colleagues who teach journalism on university courses say their students now have one ambition: the Guardian or bust. It's an extraordinary reputational turnaround over a couple of decades.

It does, however, come at a cost, both to the paper and our entire culture. A large number of Guardian staff are now US-based and US-born. They think of it as their paper too – and since it calls itself 'global', why shouldn't they?

The gender politics which are currently ripping apart various institutions and bodies in our country – universities, the lesbian and gay community, the SNP, the Green Party – originally emanated from US universities. Woke ideology is a US creation.

Some people in this country have no problem with that. For others of us, the imposition of these US values on our politics and institutions is as much a form of cultural imperialism as the infliction of McDonalds, Coca Cola and Hollywood on the entire world.

The petition that made life unbearable for @suzanne_moore, a working-class feminist and the doyenne of liberal newspaper columnists, was mainly signed by US back-office staff. We can't read Suzanne in the Guardian because a bunch of young IT staff in New York don't want us to.

That's just one example. There are loads of others. The misreporting of the WiSpa affair – by two of the Guardian's US journalists – makes a nadir in its life as a credible newspaper.

And the grotesque misrepresentations that either censor women's concerns about a major attack on hard-won rights or falsely portray them as 'anti-trans' are further evidence of the same process: US cultural values dominating and distorting UK coverage.

One day perhaps we'll hear the real story about why they dropped the most famous fiction-writer in the world from their birthdays column, a petty and vindictive form of cancellation. My guess is they did it for fear of tantrums from their US staff.

Where will it end? This may not be a popular opinion, but pity editor Kath Viner, who didn't make the decision to turn the paper global and is now stuck trying to ride two horses, with two sets of staff and two sets of readers threatening to bolt in opposite directions.

She's stuck with a legacy inherited from her predecessor, stemming entirely from hubris. It's unlikely to end well, unless she lets one horse loose and go on its own way. But maybe it's too late for that.