Jonathan Liew was awarded columnist of the year as his employer, Guardian Sport, was named sports publisher of the year at the Sports Journalists’ Association (SJA) British Sports Journalism Awards on Monday, April 28th.
Alongside individual recognition for several Guardian Sport journalists, Liew won for the fifth time in eight years, while also receiving bronze in the football journalist of the year category.
In explaining the decision, SJA judges praised the Guardian’s output, describing it as “a selection box of delights, consistently catering for many tastes.”
However, Liew’s award comes amid ongoing controversy surrounding a previous column, which provoked anger in the British Jewish community. The Guardian sports writer went after Gail’s bakery after it was vandalized, with windows smashed and red-paint daubed pro-Palestinian and antisemitic slogans. In the eyes of the protestors, the coffee shop chain’s ‘crime’ is that it was first set up as a wholesale bakery by a British-born Jew, Yael Mejia, in the early 1990s.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews condemned the attacks on the bakery, stating that targeting a business on the basis of perceived Jewish or Israeli connections reflects a “very worrying trend.”
In his column, Liew referred to the bakery’s expansion near a Palestinian-owned café and described it as a form of “aggression.” Gail’s later reminded the public it is
a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK.
The article was subsequently amended, and the controversy prompted criticism from journalists and public figures, as well as a couple of mealy-mouthed ‘clarifications’ from his employer, the Guardian. (Liew himself has previously argued that the domination of women’s sport by ‘transwomen’—i.e. men—would be “inspiring,” without provoking a response from the media group.)
The Guardian itself has grown massively hostile to Israel over time (even compared to 20 years ago, when the relationship was characterised as one of mere ‘disenchantment.’) All this helps to explain how government propaganda posters on the streets of the Islamic Republic of Iran now feature star Guardian columnist Owen Jones.
