Fuck You Daily Mail

November 9, 2012 3:31 PM

Fuck You Daily Mail. Martin Robbins of The Pod Delusion, gives a 20 minute presentation of his thoughts concerning The Daily Mail (slyt).
posted by jontyjago (22 comments total)

See also the fantastic Daily Mail Song
posted by Blasdelb at 4:07 PM on November 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

Very cathartic. Thank you.

Sadly, all publicity is good publicity.
posted by Talkie Toaster at 4:08 PM on November 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

So they're sort of like the British Fox News?
posted by jnnla at 5:40 PM on November 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

They have great photos and do a great job of curating "viral" content. Nice layout, too.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:08 PM on November 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

Don't forget the professional white background.
posted by dumbland at 6:52 PM on November 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

They have great photos and do a great job of curating "viral" content.

Yes. So do dicks.

Not a coincidence.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:37 PM on November 9, 2012 [2 favorites]

Fuck You, Daily Mail.

/feels good
posted by benito.strauss at 7:48 PM on November 9, 2012 [1 favorite]

They have great photos

For a certain sort of taste so did Gary Glitter's hard disk.
posted by howfar at 7:49 PM on November 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

Having read UKHOME as well as whatever is fed abroad, I can see why it's so easy to deride the Daily Mail. (They're very "righty tighty" tabloid, etc. whatever.)

OTOH, and very surprisingly, the Daily Mail is often more informative about things on my own home-front than any of my local news media. Case in point...Murder in Coronado.

Local news outlets virtually ignored this case because of embarrassment resulting from jurisdictional problems and local LE investigation failures.

The Daily Mail was there-Film at Eleven!
posted by snsranch at 9:22 PM on November 9, 2012

The problem is that the Mail has, to put it charitably, a not uncomplicated relationship with the truth. Once you're familiar with its tendency to distort, misrepresent and fabricate, it becomes useless even as a source of basic information.
posted by howfar at 10:38 PM on November 9, 2012 [3 favorites]

This is not news. In both senses.

Reading of the Daily Mail is one of those things I use to decide whether I'm even going to bother to consider the possibility that a person might be a decent human being. If you read the Daily Mail (for reasons other than researching the enemy or masochistic horror) you're beyond the pale, and you'd better stay off my ragedar unless you actually enjoy being subjected to massive, incontinent torrents of splenetic verbal abuse.
posted by Decani at 12:13 AM on November 10, 2012 [8 favorites]

I think this lecture does a good job of explaining why I despise the DAILY MAIL. I can imagine showing it to someone who was well-intentioned, but didn't quite *get* why the paper was so horrible. It might not convince them, but at least it lays out the three main points against the paper:

1) It is hypocritical - it attacks sexual immorality, but at the same time wallows in quasi-paedophilic lusting over teenage girls; it slams women for anything other than domesticity, but relentlessly fusses over the looks of celebrities etc.

2) It is unethical - some striking allegations about the Daily Mail's culture of dishonesty and journalistic malpractice have come out in recent years; they also are probably the greatest source of fatuous science reporting I have ever come across.

3) It teaches people to be afraid of harmless things. The point that Martin makes in the talk about his granddad is something I have seen myself - otherwise very intelligent people (often ageing white men, actually) can be thoroughly taken in by the Daily Mail's brand of toxic journalism and it is sad to see.
posted by lucien_reeve at 2:53 AM on November 10, 2012 [7 favorites]

There are lots, lots of other ways in which the Mail is a shitstain on British society. It is now basically competing directly in the TMZ/Gawker/Huffpo space, with all the speed to site and variability in fact checking that involves.

So, even if the Mail was starting out from a position of actually trying to report the facts correctly, its business model places huge pressure on its staff to deliver more stories, and deliver them first. The result is, inevitably, plagiarism, gullibility and horribly misjudged pieces. Even by the Mail's low standards.

The most important thing to understand about the Mail is that it doesn't care about the facts. Not because it is a horrible xenophobic, anti-science little rag. But because it is no longer a newspaper. It no longer pretends to be a newspaper. Paul Dacre is widely admired within the industry because he understood a long time before his rivals what commercial survival in an era of social media looks like. Murdoch's belated response was to put the Times behind the paywall. Dacre's strategy has been to turn the Mail into the classleading linkbait site. And to hold his competitors under water. To that end, vigorous agreement or splenetic disgust with its content are bedfellows if they bring in the punters.

If you really, really hate the Daily Mail and want it to wither and die, the best advice is the advice your mother gave you as a kid: just ignore them.
posted by MuffinMan at 7:30 AM on November 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

Let's not forget that the Mail was a standard bearer for the anti-vaccination campaigns in the UK, causing disproportionate panic at the time of Wakefield's paper and continuing the scare stories long after the research -- and Wakefield himself -- had been discredited.

They weren't alone, but they were one of the earliest, longest, and loudest voices telling parents to avoid the MMR jabs. As such, a lot of the blame for the increases in children's suffering from preventable diseases can be laid at their door. In years to come, at least a few of the deaths from cervical cancer in this country will be their fault, too.
posted by metaBugs at 7:57 AM on November 10, 2012 [2 favorites]

This was entertaining, and it is useful news for non-Brits. Those of us over in America didn't mostly didn't know anything about the Mail a few years ago. But with the internet, I've come across more links to the Mail's web site. And it's taken a while to figure out that "Daily Mail = ignore automatically". So this is a nice explanation of precisely why.
posted by benito.strauss at 8:49 AM on November 10, 2012

It blows most of what is left of my fucked up mind to realize that The Daily Mail has become the leading online newspaper in the world.
We are truely fucked as a race if this is what our intellect has become.
MailOnline's success in the United States has been partly built, most pundits agree, on celebrity gossip.
Now how come that doesn´t surprise me.
posted by adamvasco at 10:10 AM on November 10, 2012

Yeah, the DM is like an unholy intersection of righteous conservatism and creepshots. I 'clear history' after very time I pay a furtive and shameful visit.
posted by marvin at 12:57 PM on November 10, 2012

The Daily Mail is what Gawker wishes it could be.
posted by Catblack at 1:46 PM on November 10, 2012

The Daily Mail is what Gawker wishes it could be.

Gawker have a long way to fall before they are like the DM.
posted by jaduncan at 3:22 PM on November 10, 2012

The Mail online is a rather different beast to the Mail on paper, and really a whole lot nastier. Google suggests that it has used the phrase "x shows off her y" more than two million times. The science reporting is worse than abysmal. It is an unbelievably shitty, fascistic place to work for. On the other hand, if the Mail quotes anyone, it normally does so accurately (however misleadingly); it puts a lot of money into journalism of the old-fashioned "finding things out" type. Even the online Mail has very high standards of basic subbing skills - the headlines are attractive and the stories, obviously, stuff people want to read.

And it has one quality all the other English papers envy. It makes money. And it has one which is almost unique. Not only does it keep its readers in a pleasurable state of outraged smugness, it works the same trick on everyone who makes a point of refusing to read it. See above.
posted by alloneword at 12:09 AM on November 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

Daily Mail articles are purposefully written so that people will forward them to their friends saying "This is a bloody outrage!".

I don't think this is restricted to their usual "Single parent Polish muslims are stealing our jobs" crowd, I'm sure they've discovered by now that a few half-truths and narrow-minded opinions get a whole bunch of people on the opposite end of the spectrum riled up and doing the same thing. As long as people click on the articles, they get the ad revenue.
posted by gronkpan at 3:14 AM on November 11, 2012

jnnla: So they're sort of like the British Fox News?

Imagine Fox News + Pedophilic & Ebophilic beauty contests. Then you have it.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:39 AM on November 12, 2012