EU migrants robbing pensioners while Britain's flooded give you cancer

February 1, 2013 4:12 PM

The curious lifecycle of Daily Express headlines: health scares, weather scares, EU villainy, migrant scares, pension scares.
posted by MartinWisse (7 comments total)

The Daily Express is a strange paper. Since exhausting everything that there was to print about Princess Diana it has flailed about trying to find its identity. It appears to have settled on the Daily Mail "make people afraid" model as the way forward. It's not as offensive as the Daily Mail, but it's not that far off really.
posted by jonnyploy at 4:26 PM on February 1

Newscomics. We expect nothing less.
posted by Jehan at 4:28 PM on February 1

I really dug the post Christmas headline contradictions - "New pension crisis on the way", yet three days later the headline reads, "Milions will get pension boost"
posted by channey at 4:28 PM on February 1

I always thought that the formulaic headlines of the various tabloids were rather pleasing aesthetically, when properly set to music of course.
posted by ubernostrum at 4:45 PM on February 1

Interesting, thanks for posting this Martin.

I wonder how close you could conceivably get to a hypothetical Express trifecta (quinfecta?). Best I can do is "Brussels bureaucrats force sick pensioners to collect benefits in gale".

It's funny which themes are left out of the top five if you look at the uncoloured ones: "economic nationalism" (the purported "boom" was just in reference to the FTSE surging in response to the U.S. fiscal cliff deal, not a very British "boom" if one at all), "get stuff cheaply" (travel agents' ad space in all but name), "royal baby", "royal baby", and "pensioner scaremongering" which should rightfully have been filed under "health/illness".

And then of course there is the Daily Mail Headline Generator.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 5:15 PM on February 1 [7 favorites]

goodnewsfortheinsane: "And then of course there is the Daily Mail Headline Generator"

That's just fantastic. On my first try, I got WILL GYPSIES IMPREGNATE CLIFF RICHARD?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:05 PM on February 1 [2 favorites]

Of course, Britain's broadsheets aren't immune to this sort of satirical ill-treatment. [NSFW; childish; frequently hilarious.]
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:25 AM on February 2