Daily Mail fail

[Gooseberrybushes]

Have just done the usual check around the papers and wanted mners to respond to a query if you can.

Re Daily Mail: the most important story of the day is not the lead, unsurprisingly, nor anywhere near it. It seems an average day for the Mail. There is the usual celebrity bilge down the right column.

So I was wondering, in terms of news choices and news coverage, what kind of thing is being objected to and on what grounds.

For eg: there's a story about school heads being paid over 100,000 a year. If you really hate the Mail, can you explain why in terms of specific stories.

Thanks. I'm neutral, I read all the papers (well not cover to cover but I get across them all online to get a rounded view.

In case this counts: my chosen paper would be the Telegraph, favoured media the BBC and out of the Guardian and the Indie, I'd take the Indie.

I wonder if anyone will respond!

''Companion animals' has been a PC alternative to 'pet' for years - is this news?'

Wow, that's news to me. It must be news to other Mail readers too, or the Mail wouldn't be publishing it. Mail readers are not au fait with the latest trends in politically correct thinking, they are not as progressive as Guardian readers.

But the daily mail isn't written by the readers, it is written by the journo who buys the stories the same as all the other papers, apart from the stories like the pc pets story which is old and free. So by reading the DM the politicians will find out what the jornos write not what the readers think. In any case its Murdoch that sorts out what the politicians think he chooses that part.

Good point. But clever journos know their readers well. They actually read their comments and letters and understand where the readers are coming from. They aren't Oxbridge educated preachers in their expensive , all expenses paid, ivory towers, pretending they are with the proletariat, like journos in some papers. Ivory tower politicians who call their lifelong voters bigots and rarely hear the opinions of real people down below, would do well to get their info secondhand from journos who are nearer to the pulse of the nation. Agree that Murdoch teels many of them what to think, but the clever ones can talk a good game, can act like Sir John Gielgud and convince us that they are 'straight kinda guys'. They can affect their mockney accents, learned late in life, years after theri education at public schools, and trot out headlines form the Mail in their attempt to woo the public to their cause.

You make a good point about the journos. it sounds like many of them just filter stories and the news. But the best selling newspapers like the Mail obviously do a better filtering job, because they give the public what they want.

A quick google finds:
The Society for Companion Animal Studies (SCAS) was established in 1979 to promote the study of human-companion animal interactions and raise awareness of the importance of pets in society

...so there's a use of the term thats over 3 decades old and actually not really an example of 'politically correct thinking' as they use 'pet' too.

I did actually scan the first couple of pages of a DM today (at the garage,,, not mine obv ), couldn't get past article on p3 with photo highlighting some "weathergirl's" cellulite... ringed picture of rather more toned than average adult female leg. sorry, is it news that most grown women have dimply fat reserves on the back of their legs? Is this an issue that needs prominenent news coverage? Was it supposed to be a 'cheerup' story?

I'm not interested in those stories, but many readers are. I don't look down at them. Everyone is interested in different things. The Mail obviously thinks that many of its readers want to read that, so it writes about it.

I don't read about sustainability etc. in the Guardian, because I know it is BS. But other readers just find it boring. Everyone has different interests. A good politician needs to understand the interests of the public, even if those interests don't interest the politician. They can't afford to sneer at the public and what they read. Otherwise, as they found out in constituencies up and down the land, come election day, they will have to vacate their seats.

That's why Clegg told us "you are the bosses". They tell us that our opinion counts, that they want to hear our views, they want to have a "Big Conversation" with us. But their mistake was to call it "Big", they tried to big it up, to hide the fact that it was all a sham. Why not just have a conversation and leave the patronisation behind? Why not just respect what people think, what interests people and what people read. If they were clever, they wouldn't play to their own gallery and sneer at the Daily Mail. Instead they would try to woo the millions that read it and win them over. But they can't hide their contempt for the readers of the Mail, those millions of bigots, many of them foolishly interested in cellulite rather than sustainability, they've lost touch with the people and that's why they are destined to lose and lose again.

I don't understand why claig thinks "the people" are all Tories.

They aren't all Tories. but the Tories won the election and the Tories got the largest percentage of votes, and the Sun and the Daily Mail have the highest sales figures and most of their readers are on the right. Labour have a smaller proportion of voters backing them than the Tories. So they need to win over Tory voters. The Tories must be rubbing their hands to see the fools on the left sneering at the Mail and scoring own goal after own goal. No wonder they lost, the final score went against them. They created a deficit and time ran out to make up their goal deficit. They had the wrong coach and the wrong strategy. Have they learnt their lesson? So far, it doesn't seem like they have changed their tactics at all.

But what about the last thirteen years, when the Mail was still very right-wing and Labour won three elections?

Labour won first of all because of Tory sleaze. Even I voted for them then. But after that, they only won because they had the backing of Murdoch, the Sun and the Times. Blair was smart, he attracted many of the Tory voters who had voted consistently for Thatcher. The Sun boosted Blair and many Tory voters fell for it and voted him in. Blair affected his mockney accent and made sure that many of his Cabinet (public school boys, ex-Marxists, the lot) wrote articles in the Sun.

They still sneered at the Mail's readers, because they hold the people in contempt. But they could get away with it, because the Sun sang their praises. But finally, the Sun turned on them, while they were still tittering away at that paper, the Daily Fail, and of course it was then inevitable that they themselves would fail.

Hmm.

Exposure of vested interests re vaccines / swine flu were not stories that stayed with me, I must say. But a quick google reveals this story, which appears to be the usual nonsense: Roy Anderson sits on a committee concerned with resilience and recuses himself whenever vaccines are discussed. But the Mail publishes anyway, thus pointlessly sullying his good name. Nice.

I've never seen a useful story examining the activities of LAs or the BBC in the Mail. Useful, to me, means highlighting meaningful malpractice or systematic overspending amounting to a material percentage of the organisation's budget - not another sodding story on CEs being paid 200k or an overly extravagant office party, which accounts for three-fifths of fuck-all. But that would require some decent analysis, so I doubt it'll ever happen.

Re having a go at Green, that doesn't really cut the mustard for me - it's a story that's been thoroughly reported in other papers. A decent news story tells me something I didn't know about previously.

By the way, none of the examples you've cited were previously mentioned on this thread. So when you said people have referred to good articles in the Mail before, what did you have in mind?

So far, I've not seen anything that's moved me away from my original belief that the Mail produces overwhelmingly more harm than good in the UK, due to its vicious hatred and overweening power.

slhilly, I think Gooseberybushes was partly referring to the articles that I brought up - the secret swine flu memos warning of possible Guillen Barre syndrome, which other organisations like the BBC had to discuss after the Mail made it open knowledge to the public. It was the same with Climategate. The Mail told the public about that before the BBC did. There are other political stories that the Mail broke about New Labour, which even the Daily Telegraph didn't run. I read the Mail alongside other papers, so I can spot when they release stories that the others are late on or which they don't touch. Gooseberrybushes is right that they do stick two fingers up and report on principle. They are now sympathetic to Blair and Brown because they have not been invited to the wedding. They are not purely partisan. They had a go at the bankers and the regulators too. They are in touch with their public, who also are not partisan. That's why I and millions of others buy the Mail - we don't buy it to read hatred, we buy it because it tells us things that the others ignore, hide or won't touch. I don't agree with their slant on everything and they have leftwing contributors like Suzanne Moore too.

If you don't like it, don't read it. But millions of ordinary people who look forward to their Daily Mail are not all hate-filled bigots as some on the left would like to paint them.

Brown & Co. and the gaggle of spinners doubtless wish that the Mail wasn't so popular and wish they had something similar to push their party line. But that is the real world, the one with real people, looked down on by the party spinners from the rarified atmosphere of their ivory towers. They call the ordinary people bigots, these Oxbridge educated elite. They say Mrs. Duffy was a bigot. But ask yourself who the really intolerant bigots are, who look down on the people they claim to represent.

They probably learnt their arrogance at public schools like Fettes. They laugh and call the paper of the people, the Daily Fail. But everytime they do, they add to their coffin yet another nail.

Climategate, Climategate....let me see. Oh yes, I remember now, that "story" about a "scandal" that turns out to have been complete and utter twaddle, but is now used by lots of idiots to justify their continued trumpeting of denial of climate change, a position that - extraordinarily enough and doubtless entirely coincidentally - allows them to continue wasting energy on the most astoundingly profligate scale. That "story". What a relief that it was published.

I never thought or claimed that the Mail was partisan, in the sense of supporting one political party to the exclusion of others. After all, Dacre and Brown were, maybe still are, good buddies. The Mail specialises in hate, which is something different. It hated my forbears in the 30s when it supported antisemitism and fascism, and it hates others today. Its expression of hatred is always slick (it pioneered the question mark headline as a method for saying something that could not be said directly), and is a constant trope.

I don't like the Mail. I don't read it. But that's not the end of it. Other people read it. They believe its idiocy. They soak up the hate through their skin, without realising they're doing it. They are, in consequence, vile about state employees, the poor, the sick, women etc etc. My MIL is a case in point - she reads it and regurgitates its bile about asylum seekers on a regular basis (which incenses me, given that she is the daughter of refugees who fled from Nazi Austria in the 30s). Thus, the country shifts in the direction of stupidity, bigotry and hate.

(And Suzanne Moore is leftwing in the same sense as David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen - sort of, ish, not really.)

So they are all idiots, us Mail readers are all idiots, in fact the majority of the public are all idiots because they don't believe in climate catastrophe and don't belive that "we have only 50 days left to save the planet". the New Statesman ran an article a few years ago saying that polls showed the majority didn't believe the claims on climate made by the elites. They asked what could be done? how should the elites adapt their message to convince the masses? Are the masses really all idiots or can they spot 'a straight kinda guy', can they name a spade a spade and a Blair a Bliar?

What's to be done? Ban the hate, ban the Mail, re-educate the idiots and stop Mrs. Duffy asking questions of the Great Leader. That's why they will continue to lose and lose again. They won't engage with the public, they won't listen to what they say. They think they can spin their way out of it. They employ wonks and twonks from the best universities in the land. That'll put the public back in line. But the public are smarter than all of them put together, they've seen it all before, they deal with Del Boy street traders everyday, so these Oxbridge policy twonks don't stand a chance.

claig, I really don't understand this thing about Oxbridge-educated elites. Dacre went to UCS and Leeds, which is as good as - UCS is one of the most academically rigorous private schools in the country. Do you really imagine that journalists at the Mail aren't Oxbridge-educated in the same numbers as journos elsewhere? Is there a factual basis for such a belief? And is there any factual basis for your contention that politicians look down on people, beyond the Gillian Duffy thing (which demonstrated that he thought she was a bigot, but does not show he thought people in general were bigots). And is there any factual basis for your implied contention that the staff on the Daily Mail do not look down on their readership? Because it sounds from here like you've told yourself a story in the absence of facts to back it up.

Is it idiotic to wilfully ignore the consensus view of the vast majority of working scientists working across a huge range of topics because the answer is discomfiting? Yes. It's of a piece with the religious idiots who won't accept blood transfusions, except that instead of killing just themselves / their family, these idiots have a chance of ruining the lives of billions of people.

Why create a strawman about banning? What would be your motivation in doing that? Oh yes, it makes you look more reasonable and me more unreasonable - but it was you who said it, not me. I believe in a free press, even when the result is a paper as dispiritingly vile, hate-filled and stupid as the Mail.

Of course they look down on us. They all do. They are all spinners. I have heard that a high proportion of Sun journalists are from Oxbridge. Don't know if that is true, but wouldn't surprise me, because they want to spin the ordinary people in what they think is the best way they can.

Of course many of them look down on ordinary people, like that Labour candidate in Scotland referred to the pensioners whose votes he was after as "coffin dodgers", and like Brown claimed that people who didn't believe in anthropomorphic climate change were "flat earthers".

I haven't got proof, I can only draw conclusions from how some lie to the public. It's no coincidence that the clever public coined the term Bliar.

Brown didn't just call Mrs. Duffy a bigot, it was her views, shared by millions, that he initially thought were bigotted. But he had a quick rethink and said he was "a repentent sinner" when the millions or ordinary people found out what he really thought.

People aren't as stupid as the spinners think. Proof is that the majority don't believe in climate catastrophe, in spite of the avalanche of spin.

They also don't believe the hate that you see in the Sun or the Mail. Give people credit, they know how to spot spin, they can spot a Bliar, they know how to read between the lines. That's why they voted New Labour out.

OK, claig, I asked you to provide some facts to support your arguments and instead you just rehashed the same lines. That's pointless. "I don't need proof" sounds like you've swallowed the single most pernicious element of the whole of the Mail's way of thinking, hook line and sinker.

They stick their fingers in their ears and sing la la la to avoid listening to what the public think. Like King Canute they sit all majestic on their thrones and ignore the tide of public opinion, the opinion of those idiotic bigots always destinmed to fail and read the Daily Mail. Their leader was Humpty Dumpty, they sat him on the wall and thought they'd spin us all, but Humpty had a crashing fall when the public turned out to vote in the halls. Now all the wonks, twonks, plonks and planks can't put him back together again.

The solution is simple, all they have to do is start telling the truth, then the public will return. But they won't learn, the truth is too simple for them, they've studied political theory and PPE, the simple things the public idiots know, they can never see.

what does claig mean about 'sustainability being BS'? what is BS?

I didn't say "I don't need proof", I said "I don't have proof". I know that things aren't always black and white, the world is complex, the truth is hard to find, that's why I try to find it as best I can, that's why I, and millions more, read the Daily Mail