The Guardian (until 1959, The Manchester Guardian) is a British newspaper owned by the Guardian Media Group. It is published Monday to Saturday in the Berliner format from its London and Manchester headquarters.

The Guardian Weekly, which circulates worldwide, provides a compact digest of four newspapers. It contains articles from The Guardian and its Sunday, sister paper The Observer, as well as reports, features and book reviews from The Washington Post and articles translated from France's Le Monde.

The Guardian had a certified average daily circulation of 355,750 copies as of August 2007 a drop of 5.94% on the first month of the year, as compared to sales of 887,664 for the Daily Telegraph, 638,820 for The Times, and 239,834 for The Independent.

The Guardian Media Group also runs a website, guardian.co.uk.

Stance and editorial opinion

Editorial articles in The Guardian are generally to the left of the political spectrum. This is reflected in the paper's readership: a MORI poll taken between April and June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters; according to another MORI poll taken in 2004, 44% of Guardian readers were Labour voters and 37% Liberal Democrat voters.

Founded by textile traders and merchants, The Guardian had a reputation as "an organ of the middle class", or in the words of C.P. Scott's son Ted "a paper that will remain bourgeois to the last". "I write for the Guardian," said Sir Max Hastings in 2005, "because it is read by the new establishment", reflecting the paper's growing influence.

1821 to 1959

The Manchester Guardian was founded in Manchester in 1821 by a group of non-conformist businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor. The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that "it will zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty ... it will warmly advocate the cause of Reform; it will endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy; and to support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures."

The Manchester Guardian was hostile to the Unionist cause in the American civil war, writing on the news that Lincoln had been assassinated "of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty".

Its most famous editor, C P Scott, made the newspaper nationally recognised. He was editor for 57 years from 1872, and became its owner when he bought the paper from the estate of Taylor's son in 1907. Under Scott the paper's moderate editorial line became more radical, supporting Gladstone when the Liberals split in 1886, and opposing the Second Boer War against popular opinion.Fact: date=April 2007. Scott supported the movement for women's suffrage, but was critical of any tactics by the Suffragettes that involved direct actionJune Purvis: "Unladylike behaviour", The Guardian, 13 November 2007: "The really ludicrous position is that Mr Lloyd George is fighting to enfranchise seven million women and the militants are smashing unoffending people's windows and breaking up benevolent societies' meetings in a desperate effort to prevent him." Scott thought the Suffragettes' "courage and devotion" was "worthy of a better cause and saner leadership". It has been argued that Scott's criticism reflected a widespread negative attitude at the time towards those women who "transgressed the gender expectations of Edwardian society".