Since 2000
In the early 2000s, The Guardian challenged the Act of Settlement 1701 and the Treason Felony Act 1848. In October 2004, The Guardian published a humorous column by Charlie Brooker in its entertainment guide, the final sentence of which was viewed by some as a call for violence against US President George W. Bush; after a controversy, Brooker and the paper issued an apology, saying the "closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action".
Following the 7 July 2005 London bombings, The Guardian published an article on its comment pages by Dilpazier Aslam, a 27-year-old British Muslim and journalism trainee from Yorkshire. Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group, and had published a number of articles on their website. According to the newspaper, it did not know that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir when he applied to become a trainee, though several staff members were informed of this once he started at the paper. The Home Office said that the group's "ultimate aim is the establishment of an Islamic state (Caliphate), according to Hizb ut-Tahrir via non-violent means". The Guardian asked Aslam to resign his membership of the group and, when he did not do so, terminated his employment.
In early 2009, The Guardian started a tax investigation into a number of major UK companies, including publishing a database of the tax paid by the FTSE 100 companies. Internal documents relating to Barclays Bank's tax avoidance were removed from The Guardian website after Barclays obtained a gagging order. The newspaper played a pivotal role in exposing the depth of the News of the World phone hacking affair. The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine opined that:
As Watergate is to [The] Washington Post, and thalidomide to [The] Sunday Times, so phone-hacking will surely be to The Guardian: a defining moment in its history.
In recent decades, The Guardian has been accused of biased criticism of Israeli government policy and of bias against the Palestinians. In December 2003, columnist Julie Burchill cited "striking bias against the state of Israel" as one of the reasons she left the paper for The Times.
Responding to these accusations, a Guardian editorial in 2002 condemned antisemitism and defended the paper's right to criticise the policies and actions of the Israeli government, arguing that those who view such criticism as inherently anti-Jewish are mistaken. Harriet Sherwood, then The Guardian's foreign editor and later its Jerusalem correspondent, has also denied that The Guardian has an anti-Israel bias, saying that the paper aims to cover all viewpoints in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
On 6 November 2011, Chris Elliott, The Guardian's readers' editor, wrote that "Guardian reporters, writers and editors must be more vigilant about the language they use when writing about Jews or Israel", citing recent cases where The Guardian received complaints regarding language chosen to describe Jews or Israel. Elliott noted that, over nine months, he upheld complaints regarding language in certain articles that were seen as anti-Semitic, revising the language and footnoting this change.
The Guardian's style guide section referred to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel in 2012. In 2012, media watchdog HonestReporting filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) after The Guardian ran a correction apologising for "wrongly" having called Jerusalem as Israel's capital. After an initial ruling supporting The Guardian, the PCC retracted its original ruling, leading to the newspaper's acknowledgement that it was wrong to call Tel Aviv Israel's capital.The Guardian later clarified: "In 1980, the Israeli Knesset enacted a law designating the city of Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as the country's capital. In response, the UN Security Council issued resolution 478, censuring the 'change in character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem' and calling on all member states with diplomatic missions in the city to withdraw. The UN has reaffirmed this position on several occasions, and almost every country now has its embassy in Tel Aviv. While it was therefore right to issue a correction to make clear Israel's designation of Jerusalem as its capital is not recognised by the international community, we accept that it is wrong to state that Tel Aviv – the country's financial and diplomatic centre – is the capital. The style guide has been amended accordingly."
On 11 August 2014 the print edition of The Guardian published a pro-Israeli advocacy advert during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict featuring Elie Wiesel, headed by the words "Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it's Hamas' turn." The Times had decided against running the ad, although it had already appeared in major American newspapers. One week later, Chris Elliott expressed the opinion that the newspaper should have rejected the language used in the advert and should have negotiated with the advertiser on this matter.
In October 2023, The Guardian stated it would not renew the contract of cartoonist Steve Bell after he submitted a cartoon featuring Netanyahu, with his shirt open, wearing boxing gloves and holding a scalpel over a dotted shape of the Gaza Strip on his stomach. The caption read: "Residents of Gaza, get out now." Due to what has been seen by some as a reference to Shakespeare's Shylock's "pound of flesh", it prompted accusations that it was antisemitic. Bell said that he was inspired by the 1960s "Johnson's Scar" cartoon by David Levine of US president Lyndon B Johnson within the context of the Vietnam War.
In August 2004, for the US presidential election, the daily G2 supplement launched an experimental letter-writing campaign in Clark County, Ohio, an average-sized county in a swing state. Editor Ian Katz bought a voter list from the county for $25 and asked readers to write to people listed as undecided in the election, giving them an impression of the international view and the importance of voting against President George W. Bush. Katz admitted later that he did not believe Democrats who warned that the campaign would benefit Bush and not his opponent, John Kerry. The newspaper scrapped "Operation Clark County" on 21 October 2004 after first publishing a column of responses—nearly all of them outraged—to the campaign under the headline "Dear Limey assholes". Some commentators suggested that the public's dislike of the campaign contributed to Bush's victory in Clark County.
In 2007, the paper launched Guardian America, an attempt to capitalise on its large online readership in the United States, which at the time stood at more than 5.9 million. The company hired former American Prospect editor, New York magazine columnist and New York Review of Books writer Michael Tomasky to head the project and hire a staff of American reporters and web editors. The site featured news from The Guardian that was relevant to an American audience: coverage of US news and the Middle East, for example.
Tomasky stepped down from his position as editor of Guardian America in February 2009, ceding editing and planning duties to other US and London staff. He retained his position as a columnist and blogger, taking the title editor-at-large.
In October 2009, the company abandoned the Guardian America homepage, instead directing users to a US news index page on the main Guardian website. The following month, the company laid off six American employees, including a reporter, a multimedia producer and four web editors. The move came as Guardian News and Media opted to reconsider its US strategy amid a huge effort to cut costs across the company. In subsequent years, however, The Guardian has hired various commentators on US affairs including Ana Marie Cox, Michael Wolff, Naomi Wolf, Glenn Greenwald and George W. Bush's former speechwriter Josh Treviño. Treviño's first blog post was an apology for a controversial tweet posted in June 2011 over the second Gaza flotilla, the controversy which had been revived by the appointment.
Guardian US launched in September 2011, led by editor-in-chief Janine Gibson, which replaced the previous Guardian America service. After a period during which Katharine Viner served as the US editor-in-chief before taking charge of Guardian News and Media as a whole, Viner's former deputy, Lee Glendinning, was appointed to succeed her as head of the American operation at the beginning of June 2015.
The Guardian later launched Australian and "International" digital editions in 2013 and 2015 respectively. In September 2023, a European digital edition was launched, part of the newspaper's efforts to be "even more European in its perspective, not less" after Brexit. Ten journalists and four columnists were initially hired for the edition. After a year, European readership increased 15%, with Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands providing the editions biggest audiences.
In October 2009, The Guardian reported that it was forbidden to report on a parliamentary matter, a question recorded in a Commons order paper, to be answered by a minister later that week. The newspaper noted that it was being "forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented—for the first time in memory—from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret. The only fact The Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck." The paper further stated that this case appeared "to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1689 Bill of Rights".
The only parliamentary question mentioning Carter-Ruck in the relevant period was by Paul Farrelly MP, in reference to legal action by Barclays and Trafigura. The part of the question referencing Carter-Ruck relates to the latter company's September 2009 gagging order on the publication of a 2006 internal report into the 2006 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump scandal, which involved a class action case that the company only settled in September 2009 after The Guardian published some of the commodity trader's internal emails. The reporting injunction was lifted the next day, as Carter-Ruck withdrew it before The Guardian could challenge it in the High Court. Alan Rusbridger attributed the rapid back-down by Carter-Ruck to postings on Twitter, as did a BBC News Online article.
In June 2013, the newspaper 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 7 June after the first Guardian story about the Snowden documents. 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's 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 criticised the newspaper for not publishing the entirety of the content when it had the chance. 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.
The Guardian published the US diplomatic cables files and the Guantanamo Bay files in collaboration with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. 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.
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: "This article is about how those [Guardian's] false claims—fabrications, really—were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news". The Guardian later amended its article about Assange to remove the claim about his connection to the Russian government. 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". A few hours after publication, "sources say" was added to the title, and the meeting became an "apparent meeting". One reporter characterised the story, "If it's right, it might be the biggest get this year. If it's wrong, it might be the biggest gaffe." 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.
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. 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".
In 2016 The Guardian took down from its website 13 articles written by freelance journalist Joseph Mayton that it believed to include fabricated information, and apologised to its readers and to those people "whose words were misrepresented or falsified".
After publishing a story on 13 January 2017 claiming that WhatsApp had a "backdoor [that] allows snooping on messages", more than 70 professional cryptographers signed on to an open letter calling for The Guardian to retract the article. On 13 June 2017, readers' editor Paul Chadwick released an article detailing the flawed reporting in the original January article, which was amended to remove references to a backdoor.
In January 2021 the Mexican La Lista Web portal started publishing content from The Guardian, translated into Spanish, on a three-year licence. The press release announcing this pointed out that The Guardian often criticised Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In December 2022 it was reported that The Guardian had suffered a significant cyber-attack on its office systems, thought to be ransomware. Staff were directed to work from home and were able to continue publishing to the website despite the loss of some internal systems. The print edition also continued to be produced. On 4 January 2023, UK staff were informed of a security breach and that the Information Commissioner's Office had been notified, as required by GDPR. It was indicated that staff would continue working from home until at least 23 January. The newspaper confirmed on 11 January that personal details of all UK staff had been accessed by criminals.
In November 2023, the Guardian joined with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Paper Trail Media and 69 media partners including Distributed Denial of Secrets and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and more than 270 journalists in 55 countries and territories to produce the 'Cyprus Confidential' report on the financial network which supports the regime of Vladimir Putin, mostly with connections to Cyprus, and showed Cyprus to have strong links with high-up figures in the Kremlin, some of whom have been sanctioned. Government officials including Cyprus president Nikos Christodoulides and European lawmakers began responding to the investigation's findings in less than 24 hours, calling for reforms and launching probes.
On 13 November 2024, a week after Donald Trump was elected as US president for the second time, The Guardian announced that it would no longer post content on X, due 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 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 6 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 18 December 2024, Guardian Media and Tortoise Media closed the sale. A new Observer website was launched on 25 April 2025, and the first print edition under Tortoise appeared on 27 April 2025.
In May 2026, a report by Amnesty International found that The Guardian was one of the primary newspapers – along with The Daily Telegraph, The Times/The Sunday Times, and The Sun – involved in manufacturing the British anti-transgender movement, via a years-long campaign designed to frame transgender people as "involved in controversy, demanding or aggressive and with a propensity to be offended" while simultaneously minimizing the impact of transgender voices and magnifying the impact of anti-trans figures and groups.
