You should when you claim that the Guardian is the only newspaper that carries out investigative journalism in Britain holding the powerful to account giving to them special claims of exceptionalism in an extraordinary piece of hyperbole. And that is just off the top of my head.
The Guardian played a part in the downfall of the News of the World no doubt but it was a collective effort and sterling work was done all round by different media and politicians. Good for them. As I said, even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
No, it didn't 'play a part'. Not at all. The whole thing started off from a book written by Nick Davies, one of their principle journalists. They gave him a lot of help and support in creating that book, a lot of co-operation too, even though a whole chapter of it is very critical of the Guardian itself. The whole hacking investigation was done by a team headed by Davies, employed, funded, supported, published, checked and followed up by the Guardian. It's about the only piece of investigative journalism I can think of for a very long time that actually took aim at the media itself. I don't think any other paper would fund such an investigation - the media, as a rule, does not investigate itself, and regardless of football coverage the Guardian deserves credit for that.
As an investigation it will have required a lot of genuine work, proper collecting of sources, wading through tons of data which won't all have been on the record, talking to journalists and private investigators and corroborating that information, all the effort that goes into fact checking it, making it watertight in the knowledge that any mistakes would have brought serious, serious legal action from extremely wealthy papers whose resources utterly dwarf the Guardian's. Not to mention that the whole case was extremely 'unsafe', namely picking on other media is not an easy way to get published, it's likely to be met with counter-claims and serious aggression.
That's not to belittle the Telegraph's work at all, credit to them - but in comparison to the Murdoch press, and the press in general, politicians are a very soft target. More to the point most of the expenses stuff will have been a matter of public record - yes, still a lot of data crunching but all of it from publicly available sources - electoral registers, the register of interests, maybe talking to family, friends, neighbours etc who would all have been easier to find, and against targets who can't afford to throw lawyers at you in the way Murdoch can.
It remains the paper most likely to give you 'the truth'. As a rule, it receives among the fewest complaints to the PCC, utterly dwarfed in terms of complaints by the Murdoch stable, which are in turn dwarfed in terms of complaints by the leading peddler of untruth and distortion in Britain - The Daily Mail, and while it's sports section is well worthy of contempt in my view - it's a total betrayal of what the paper is supposed to stand for, and it's absurd that they don't hold the whole section to the kind of standard that David Conn sets - the investigation into phone hacking deserves a lot better than to be damned with faint praise, and a suggestion that plenty of other papers are doing that kind of thing because they simply aren't, no other paper would have taken on such an investigation, and no other paper has come out with something like this for a long time. One paper effectively bringing down another paper through investigative journalism is pretty much unheard of, certainly in this country, as far as I know. Let alone a title as huge and profitable and powerfully backed as the NOTW.