UK · Bias: Left-leaning
Scott Trust Limited (no shareholders)
Who owns The Guardian? Nobody you can buy shares in. It belongs to the Scott Trust — a structure created in 1936 (a limited company since 2008) whose only job is to own Guardian Media Group forever and keep the paper editorially independent. No proprietor, no dividend-hungry shareholders, and a war chest to make it stick: the Trust's endowment stood at £1.35 billion in March 2026 (Press Gazette, reporting the Scott Trust Limited accounts, 15 September 2026). That cushion got its biggest boost in 2014 when the Trust sold its stake in Auto Trader, yes, the used-car classifieds site, for £619 million. The independence bought it the nerve to publish Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance leaks in 2013, work that won a shared Pulitzer Prize with The Washington Post in 2014. It also produced one of journalism's stranger true stories: to satisfy the UK government without fully surrendering, editors destroyed the Guardian's own hard drives containing the files with angle grinders in their basement, while GCHQ agents stood and watched — and still left empty-handed, because copies already existed abroad. OWNERSHIP AS OF OCTOBER 2026 The ownership chain is short and deliberately boring. The Guardian is published by Guardian News & Media, which belongs to Guardian Media Group, which is owned outright by the Scott Trust Limited. No outside shareholders, no dividends, nobody to sell to. Anna Bateson is chief executive of Guardian Media Group and Charles Gurassa chairs its board. The Scott Trust itself is chaired by Ole Jacob Sunde, formerly chair of Norway's Schibsted media group (Scott Trust Limited annual report 2024/25, published September 2025). Katharine Viner has been editor-in-chief since June 2015, and Betsy Reed edits the US edition. The money has changed shape lately. In April 2025 the group sold The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, to Tortoise Media, which took roughly £18m of annual print revenue with it. The 2025/26 accounts, published in September 2026, still showed group revenue up 2% to a record £282m. Digital reader revenue rose 17% to £126m, 1.4 million people now pay on a recurring basis (about 500,000 of them in the US), and 41% of revenue comes from outside the UK. Editorial headcount fell to 865 from 913, mainly through the Observer transfer and redundancies. The annual loss, measured as net cash outflow, shrank to £17m from £25m the year before and £37m the year before that. The Scott Trust's endowment, which covers that loss, grew by £100m to £1.35bn (Press Gazette on the Scott Trust Limited accounts, 15 September 2026). Inside the building, the autumn has been less tidy. The National Union of Journalists turned down a 3.85% pay offer in August 2026, saying it did not "meaningfully" address cost-of-living pressures; the Guardian described it as "a fair and industry-leading pay offer" (The Telegraph, 13 August 2026). By mid-September staff were voting in an indicative strike ballot (The Telegraph, as reported by Press Gazette, 15 September 2026). We have not found a reported result as of this review, so treat the dispute as open. One thing missing from that list: a paywall. The site is still free to read anywhere in the world, paid for by the readers who choose to chip in. IS THE GUARDIAN LEFT OR RIGHT? Our read: left-leaning, openly so, and by institutional habit rather than by an owner's instruction — which is precisely why we read it closely. A paper with no proprietor still has a worldview, and a worldview shows up in which half of a story gets the headline. Eight dated examples from our own archive: On 17 July 2026, the day Andy Burnham was confirmed as Labour leader, the Guardian's sketch ran as a coronation ("All hail the king") — while the most newsworthy line of the week, that even loyalists did not know his plans for office, sat three paragraphs into a story about how he takes his tea. On 21 July 2026, his first morning in Downing Street, "hope" appeared in three separate headlines on the Guardian's politics feed, alongside three commissioned cartoons of him in 24 hours. On 26 July 2026, the Guardian's headline on a police inquiry read "Police investigate payments to Reform UK first revealed by the Guardian." The BBC's headline on the same inquiry was nine words and contained no newspaper's name. On 5 August 2026, "AI models shock UK testers by using fake identities to trick developers" led the page; the detail that testers had deliberately switched off the models' safety filters and given them internet access sat at paragraph 15, our count. On 7 August 2026, one story used two verbs for the same behaviour: Iran "plots" to time a war around the US midterms, while a quoted Republicans Overseas chair described the Trump administration "navigating the pre-election waters adroitly." On 9 August 2026, a headline was upgraded after publication to "in rare public break with Trump" — but the URL, which freezes at publication, still carried the flatter original: "Israel rejects US-led 15-point Gaza peace plan, says Netanyahu." On 23 August 2026, credit where it is due: the Guardian's exclusive on London's unsolved homicides opened with a subject, a verb and a consequence rather than the usual passive-voice packaging, and put the 61.7% / 92.9% gap in plain sight. On 30 August 2026, one prison announcement with three parts produced two front pages. The BBC led on the killers who would stay in jail; the Guardian led on the indefinite sentences being ended. Both headlines were true. Each paper picked the half its readers had ordered. IS THE GUARDIAN RELIABLE? CAN YOU CITE IT? For most purposes, yes — with the usual caveat that a headline is not a source and the story underneath it is. It does original reporting at scale, names its sources where it can, and runs a daily corrections column. Its Snowden work shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The Washington Post. The regulatory picture is unusual and worth knowing before you cite it. The Guardian is not a member of IPSO or Impress, the two UK press regulators. It runs its own system: a readers' editor who handles complaints independently of the newsroom, plus an external review panel whose rulings — including ones against the paper — are published on the Guardian's own site. Whether that beats an outside regulator is a fair argument; the fact to know is that the complaints route is internal. And our own honest caveat: everything we write here is our reading, not a scientific rating. We have no bias-score algorithm. We compare headlines to the stories under them, day by day, and show our work so you can disagree with it. WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY ASK Is the Guardian left or right? Left-leaning, in our assessment, and fairly open about it in its comment pages. Its news reporting is a separate question and often holds up better than its headline writing. Who owns the Guardian newspaper? The Scott Trust Limited, through Guardian Media Group. No individual, family or listed company owns a share of it. Is the Guardian free? Yes. No paywall, no registration wall for articles — the reader-funding appeals at the bottom of pieces are the business model. Is the Guardian reliable for research? Reasonably, as a secondary source. For anything contested, follow its links to the primary document and cite that instead. Is the Guardian reliable and unbiased? Those are two questions. Reliable on facts, in our reading; unbiased, no, and it does not really claim to be. WHAT CHANGED Last reviewed 11 October 2026: refreshed the ownership section with the 2025/26 accounts published in September 2026 (record £282m revenue, £1.35bn endowment, £17m loss), corrected the Scott Trust chair to Ole Jacob Sunde (Charles Gurassa chairs the Guardian Media Group board, not the Trust), and added the open 2026 pay dispute. Previous review 18 September 2026 added the ownership line, the Observer sale, the press-regulation position and eight dated examples from our own archive.
In 2016, The Guardian was part of a massive international collaboration — coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists across dozens of newsrooms worldwide — that published the Panama Papers: 11.5 million leaked documents exposing how the world's wealthy and powerful hid money in offshore shell companies. The goal was straightforward: follow the money wherever it led, regardless of whose name came up. It led, among many places, to Iceland's own prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who resigned within days of the documents revealing he and his wife had secretly owned an offshore company holding investments in Iceland's own collapsed banks. It remains one of the largest and most consequential leak-based investigations in journalism history.