The people’s flag is now kinda yellow: workers’ revolution reclaims The Canary

There are many, many voices in Australian politics and media who are just furious at the out-of-touch, elitist, hard-leftie media that apparently dominates the public square in Australia. Apparently. So please, never let Gerard Henderson hear about UK outlet The Canary, whose workers have “overthrown” the site’s management and are now running the publisher as a “co-operative”.

The Canary has been operating since 2015, setting itself out as a hard-left alternative (in tone, if not in readership) to tabloids like The Sun and The Daily Mail — and it has faced similar criticisms for sensationalism, clickbait and reporting skewed by as much a “hyperpartisan” lens as those publications. Canary co-founder and then editor-in-chief Kerry-Anne Mendoza told Buzzfeed back in 2016:

‘We don’t have any affiliations with political parties, we don’t have any affiliations with political organisations, and we’re not actually ostensibly left-wing,’ she added, calling the site’s editorial stance ‘a counterpoint to conservative media’ and ‘broadly liberal’

Given this abundance of common-sense liberalism, it must have been a shock to Mendoza — who left in September 2021 — when The Canary went through an actual sodding workers‘ revolution:

The tone hasn’t shifted much since the change (sample headline: “Austerity didn’t kill 334,000 people — the Tories did”), except now among the featured articles are a series of investigations into the “toxic culture” of The Canary’s own workplace.