Daily Mail

The Daily Mail in 1938. Today it has the same message against asylum seekers.

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“”The Daily Mail leads with the headline "Everything Is Fine: Fear It, Fear It."

—That Mitchell And Webb Look

The Daily Mail (a.k.a. Hate Mail, Daily Fail, Daily Heil, Daily Moan, Crazy Mail, and so on) is a reactionary right-wing tabloid rag masquerading as a "traditional values" middle-class newspaper that is, in many ways, the second-worst of the British gutter press (only Rupert Murdoch's The Sun is worse). The Mail has been so consistently bad that Orwell called them out in Homage to Catalonia for supporting Franco. The Mail has also infamously supported Oswald Mosley and fascism.

The Daily Mail is to the UK what the New York Post is to the United States, and what the Drudge Report is to the Internet: to wit, gossipy tabloid "journalism" for those who cannot digest serious news, with a flippantly wingnut editorial stance. Like the Daily Express, it tries to appear more upmarket and respectable than the red-top British tabloids, though it does sometimes go in for the full front-page picture or headline characteristic of the populist rags. It is also notorious for its frequent harassment of individuals, campaigns of hate directed at various minorities (often people who are Muslim or transgender), and willfully deceiving and lying to its readers.

Much of its content is designed to trigger readers' limbic systems, so articles generate strong emotions of hate, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and occasionally happiness (usually because a white middle-class person has done something nice, or kittens). Like trout in a fish farm pond, readers wait for the Daily Mail to fling the next story to them about ne'er-do-wells smirking, scruffy women in tracksuits smoking outside court (where they face charges of drunken assault or benefit fraud), brown people and assorted foreigners doing the things that they do, lefties campaigning about something, or working class people enjoying themselves in a non-approved way. Then the readership erupts into a foaming fury that quickly subsides as they wait for the next story. But the fury doesn't completely subside; it leaves a residual anger that simmers in the background and requires another trigger story to allow it to boil over once more.

History

Well, that's rather blatant...

The Daily Mail was founded in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe (then plain Alfred Harmsworth), who amassed a newspaper empire which also included The Daily Mirror, The Times, the Sunday Times, The Observer, Sunday Dispatch, and The Evening News; his brother Harold Harmsworth (later Lord Rothermere) gained a controlling interest in 1922 after his death. The paper's fact-checking ability was first made apparent on 16 April 1912, when it ran the headline "Titanic Sunk. No Lives Lost. Collision with an Iceberg. Largest Ship in the World. 2,358 Lives in Peril. Rush of Liners to the Rescue. All Passengers Taken Off." Compare this to the New York Herald April 15, 1912 headline, "The Titanic Sinks with 1,800 on Board; Only 675, Mostly Woman and Children, Saved"

It was under the proprietorship of Lord Rothermere that, in 1924, it achieved some notoriety by publishing the Zinoviev letter, a forged document which indicated that British Communists were planning violent revolution. This had a significant influence on the outcome of the general election four days later which resulted in defeat for the Labour Party. This is why some people refer to the rag as the Forgers' Gazette.

During the 1930s, the Daily Mail was sympathetic to German and Italian fascism, as Rothermere was friendly with both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. An article by Rothermere printed in the paper also praised the British Union of Fascists (known as the Blackshirts) leader Oswald Mosley for "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine." After Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia around 1939, Rothermere congratulated him and urged him to invade Romania next. Joseph Goebbels himself was impressed, writing in a personal diary: "Rothermere pays me great compliments … Strongly anti-Jewish. … He is a strong supporter of the Führer." Elsewhere, Rothermere praised Hitler as "great and superhuman". As well as devoting a lot of time to diplomacy with fascists, Lord Rothermere was occupied with a failed scheme to become King of Hungary, so his son, Esmond Harmsworth, took an increasing role at the papers in the 1930s.

In turn, the 3rd Viscount, Vere Harmsworth, took over in 1970. Despite the paper's moralising about other people's private lives, Vere was a keen womanizer and socialite, and enjoyed an open marriage to actress Beverly Brooks, known as "Bubbles" Rothermere, until her death in 1992. In 1998, when his new Korean wife proved too much for him, the late Vere was replaced by his son Jonathan, the present owner and 4th Viscount Rothermere. Despite professed patriotism, the 3rd Viscount had become a tax exile in France, and his son continues to claim "non-dom" tax status as an honorary Frenchperson.

In 1971, the Daily Mail absorbed its stablemate, the Daily Sketch, a populist right-wing tabloid from which the previous broadsheet Daily Mail took its more sensationalist modern elements.

In 2014, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which also owns trashy tabloids, accused the Australian online edition of the Daily Mail of plagiarism.

In November 2018, ABC Australia's Media Watch programme devoted an entire broadcast to the Daily Mail Online's mass plagiarism of other journalists' work and its effect on revenue and the ongoing viability of other newspapers.

Viewpoints

“”Racist in public, so you don't have to be.

—Russell Howard, Mock the Week

A real Daily Mail front page. Did you know that blacks have 18 more kids than middle-class white people and also Kate Moss has even more shoes?

The Mail is usually considered the furthest-right of all British newspapers and tabloids, competing for this spot with the Daily Express. Although some of the red-top tabloids might throw about more extreme rhetoric, their laddish attitude often means they're not taken too seriously. Below documents their most well-known stances, but their targets include Romani people, the workshy, Young People Today, the public sector, the BBC (which, in full Fox News style, it says has a strong liberal bias), and anyone to the left of Norman Tebbit.

Irrespective of the level of moderation, reader comments are an endless source of amusement as a place where misanthropes, misogynists, racists, and conspiracy theorists gather to spout their nonsense, presumably because every single person in their lives is utterly fed up with hearing their angry and sour views. Starting a statement with "No doubt…" means that something that hasn't happened (and will never happen in the real world) will definitely happen in their seething imagination: "No doubt there will be minarets on Westminster Abbey within 5 years". "No doubt it will soon be illegal to wish someone Happy Christmas." "No doubt anyone who defends themselves against burglars will be jailed for life before long". And so on. Following the successful setup of the online version of the Daily Mail, a Facebook page was created, apparently for readers frustrated that comment moderators sometimes removed the most mouthfoamingly racist comments. Please do not read Daily Mail Facebook comments if you wish to preserve any faith in human nature.

Anti-immigration

See the main article on this topic: Illegal immigration

The Mail's editorial stances are indistinguishable from the British National Party (BNP)'s policies. The Mail blamed the European Union and European immigration to Britain for the economic crisis and wonders why people vote for the BNP. It likes to incite its readers against minorities with sensationalist headlines about the benefits immigrants receive and the threat they pose to British culture and security (almost always entirely founded on lies).

It is exceptionally rare for the main headline to be unlinked to asylum seekers or "dangerous" foreigners in some way or another, regardless of the context of the story. Such is the case with Mahira Rustam Al-Azawi, who would otherwise just be another case of long-term fraud if it wasn't for the Mail slanting it toward her being an Iraqi asylum seeker.

Despite believing itself to be the last bastion of English values, the Daily Mail often displays a very poor grasp of both the language and geography of England. Maps hurriedly created to illustrate a story often have cities comically marked in the wrong place, often out by hundreds of miles. In 2016, a story about the causeway to Holy Island in the North Sea described it as crossing "the River Tyne", a mere 60 miles out and the wrong type of water. The almost daily articles about road rage or fatal traffic accidents very often feature sentences such as "he applied his breaks", "despite jamming on his breaks", and "he was seen to be breaking hard"; and in one case used "broke" as the past tense of brake.

The Mail also occasionally expresses anti-American views. The aforementioned favourite European statesman once called the US a "mongrel nation", and the Mail has rarely disagreed with this sentiment. One notable example occurred on 5 September 1956, in a commentary on the film The Blackboard Jungle, the first with a rock-and-roll soundtrack. And what did the Mail's editorial writer think of the movie and of rock-and-roll? No doubt they would have preferred Pat Boone if he wasn't one of those nasty colonials, too.

Religion

While scientific surveys have shown that 73% of the British population don't really give a fuck about religion, the Mail touts itself as the last bastion defence of 1400 years of UK Christian values. They stand defiant in the face of both the Muslim and the atheist threat, such as when the evil Beeb decided to remove the good and proper AD and BC in favour of CE and BCE… except nothing of the kind actually happened. The BBC uses both, but the editor of the religion section of the website decided that BCE and CE were more appropriate religiously neutral terms, in line with the BBC's impartiality rather than its supposed atheistic bias. The Mail even went so far as to needlessly imply that it was a Muslim man advancing his own agenda. Essentially, like all religious fundamentalists and political fringe groups, the Mail is simply interpreting actual neutrality as a bias against itself, rather than seeing its own biases and preferences for what they are.

Recently, though, the Mail has been quite supportive of atheist claims such as the claim that Jesus didn't exist, even publishing a nobody's claim on this matter.

Anti-welfare

For the last few years, the Mail has been the leading voice in demonising anyone who claims social benefits for any reason whatsoever (while completely oblivious that the State Pension received by about 15m people is a social benefit), which has been shown to fuel stigma of the majority of genuine claimants and discourage people who may need help from seeking it. "Single mothers", for decades one of the Daily Mail's many targets for reader hate, are always irresponsible, lazy, and "loose", unless they are middle-class, in which case widowhood or being abandoned by a husband for his secretary at the bank where he works are allowable as an excuse (complete with sad face photos and many sympathetic column inches).

Pro-Brexit

Although these days the Daily Mail is rabidly eurosceptic, this was not always its editorial stance. In fact, during the 1930s, the paper was a big fan of a united European superstate. However, due to a deterioration in Britain's relationship with the Mail's favourite European statesman, the paper was obliged to reverse its stance on the issue rather suddenly in late 1939.

Violence in media

Despite having loudly campaigned for many years against fictional violence in movies and video games, on any given day its website Mail Online will feature several videos of violent death: industrial explosions, suicide bombers, police shootings, horrific crashes, falls from high places, workers crushed by equipment, murder by knife or gun, or anything else that interns have found while trawling the internet for gory content.

As late as the 1980s, the Daily Mail used overseas stories of unusual death or injury as amusing filler, until even readers began to complain. A Chinese motorcyclist being killed after crashing into a large hole in the road was reported in a comedic way, because, as readers suggested, he wasn't British (a.k.a. he didn't look white). Similarly, images of the dead and dying would be printed without question if the victims looked foreign, and particularly if they were not white European, when a greater sensitivity would be shown if the victims looked white. After a terror attack in Nairobi in 2019, there was criticism of the Mail Online and others for showing the bodies of victims because they were black and not white; however, by 2019, the Mail Online made no such distinction and would show almost any images of dead bodies that they could obtain.

Health

Cancer

The Mail is known for obsessing over dangers from health scares (such as the Andrew Wakefield controversy) to paedophiles. With cancer, the Mail has found possibly its greatest asset in attempting to scare its readers into doing a lot of crazy shit. Among the items claimed by the paper to cause cancer (based on "scientific" research) are mouthwash, oral sex, Pringles, Facebook, and coffee. On the other hand, cures for cancer include tofu, the yellow fever vaccine, ketchup, and coffee. Care is needed when interpreting the articles, as much of the evidence is mixed with nonsense. Some things such as mouthwash containing alcohol do indeed increase the risk of cancer — if you're an alcoholic extracting the alcohol from mouthwash for a buzz.

For the terminally confused, as the Mail is sometimes inconsistent on the subject, a near-enough full record of everything that cures and causes cancer is available at the 'Kill or Cure' website and on the Daily Mail Oncological Project.

HPV

See the main article on this topic: HPV vaccine

In April 2009, science blogger Martin Robbins, under the handle "The Lay Scientist", noted an interesting discrepancy in the policy of the Daily Mail. On the British edition, known for its scare stories on health, there was a demand to stop the compulsory administration of the HPV cervical cancer vaccine. This is fair enough and expected from the Daily Mail, as these people will go against any medical treatment given away for free. One underlying theme was the suspicion that young girls given the vaccine would immediately become promiscuous, having been freed from fear of contracting HPV, part of the longstanding puritanical worldview that underlies much of Daily Mail's content.

However, on the Irish edition, there was a campaign to "roll out the vaccine now!" demanding that the government issue it immediately, as in Ireland, it wasn't going to be issued as freely as in Britain. As the Daily Mail and the Irish Daily Mail are owned by the same people and have the same (alleged) editorial stance, this wasn't a case of The Guardian saying one thing and The Express saying another. This has led to people declaring that the Mail's true position is "whatever the government is for, we're against."

Cannabis and schizophrenia

See the main articles on this topic: Marijuana woo and Schizophrenia

In October 2011, the Daily Mail printed an article that claimed "Just ONE cannabis joint can bring on schizophrenia as well as damaging memory." This led to Dorothy Bishop, professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, awarding the Daily Mail the "Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation," for what she called "the worst misrepresentation of a scientific article in a national newspaper."

The Press Complaints Commission refused to investigate it, though the article's author, Paul Dacre, was chairman of the PCC Editors' Code of Practice Committee at the time. Shortly after winning Prof. Bishop's "award," the Daily Fail did nothing to correct the misrepresentation, though they changed "causes schizophrenia" to "causes episodes similar to schizophrenia."

Asbestos

See the main article on this topic: Asbestos

Christopher Booker, one of the Daily Mail's star columnists, regularly takes up brave positions that run counter to science, fact, and reality. These include "scepticism" about climate change, a preference for intelligent design over evolution, and the belief that passive smoking is not bad for your health. He pushes even further with his own branch of reality by making repeated claims that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and the threat from it is so "vanishingly small" that a study by the UK's Health and Safety Executive had concluded that the danger was "insignificant" and with "arguably zero" risk of lung cancer.

As usual with the Mail, the UK's Health and Safety Executive does not agree with Booker and has described his claims regarding asbestos as "substantially misleading." It's probably coincidental that Booker's claims are strikingly similar to those of the British Asbestos Industry.

Other views

• Anti-LGBT
• Anti-human rights because "human rights" only protect the obviously guilty and/or paedophiles or darkies.
• Anti-taxes (mainly for those who can afford to pay them)
• Anti-intellectualism ('what do they know?') including academics, experts (including doctors); indeed anyone with an "-ology". A. N. Wilson famously stated that "The trouble with a 'scientific' argument, of course, is that it is not made in the real world, but in a laboratory by an unimaginative academic relying solely on empirical facts".
• Anti-liberal (not realising that the opposite of liberalism — (with a small 'l') is not Conservatism but totalitarianism/fascism)
• Claiming that political changes were because of their campaigns
• Loves the British army

Femail

What's this thin sliver of a line? Yes, it's the Femail website with a bit of news on the side. The word count of the Femail side bar is in the region of 4,400 — the article only 260. Literally, only 4% of this page is actual article. Really.

“	…it's not really a conventional news site at all, more a big online bin full of pictures of reality stars, with the occasional Stephen Glover column lobbed in to lighten the mood.	”
—Charlie Brooker

"Femail" (besides being a terrible pun) is The Daily Mail's specific "women's section," dedicated to celebrities, their designer shoes (because of course, what overpriced clothes a woman is wearing is interesting), and other miscellaneous gossip. Femail dominates the right hand margin of the Mail's website — usually extending several times the length of all other content — meaning that even if you only care about the political or medical stances of the paper while reading online, you certainly won't be able to escape the latest mega-important headlines about Kim Kardashian's latest photo-shoot or Victoria Beckham's latest publicity stunt. Its ubiquity on the site is either due to the paper's dedication to the feminist cause, treating women's issues with equal importance or because their machismo-full male readers like to have one off the wrist to a drunk Lindsay Lohan in their lunch breaks. The Femail section is also the place to see the most sexually explicit images that Mail can find, from the racy outfits of pop starlets to nude photoshoots or wardrobe malfunctions of celebrities. The Mail has often received some criticism for this section and accusations of outright hypocrisy, as the paper frequently complains of sexualised images broadcast on British television before the watershed time, but seems to have no problem in broadcasting these images and more to the world on a website that has no watershed time at all.

Notable is the tendency of Femail's female writers to adopt a critical and negative view of female matters (along the lines of "Yes, I'm female, but aren't feminists AWFUL?" or "As a woman I believe that men SHOULD be paid more"), thus supporting the overall misogynist tone of the paper. A perfect example would be the headline from 2018: "To bra or not to bra: It's the question at the heart of a new feminist battleground... so which of these two looks would YOU judge harshly?" Because you have to judge women harshly, whatever they do.

"Sidebar of shame"

Exclusive to the Mail Online, this "sidebar of shame", featuring on women's naughty bits, has been described as "the raucous and shameless energy of the tabloid press". However, despite this obvious pandering, this has turned out to be unprofitable for the company. Observers delight in comparing DM stories about "perverts" convicted of upskirting with stories in the SoS featuring "wardrobe malfunctions" where female celebrities accidentally expose their underwear, as photographed by a paid pap lying on the ground to obtain the images. Whether or not the Daily Mail that features the Sidebar of Shame is related in any way to the Daily Mail that in the 1980s campaigned against sex in movies, on TV, in music, in art, or indeed anywhere else, is unclear.

And now the weather

The Mail gets many of its weather stories from two companies: the ironically-named Exacta Weather and the management speak-tastic Positive Weather Solutions. Their forecasters appear to have wide-ranging skills, from Ukrainian brides to stock photo models and sporters of emo hair. Thus far, they appear not have attained visibility in the field of meteorology. Thus the Mail appears to take its weather news from sources which are, shall we say, far from the action.

Link bait

Not even once.

Some theories have emerged that the Daily Mail merely writes the trash it does in order to provoke massive swarms of links and clicks to its website, thus milking its sponsors and advertisers for masses of cash. In response to this, the website IstyOsty was formed with the intention of storing Daily Mail articles on a proxy server so that people could read them without contributing to the Mail's view count. Not massively impressed with such an evil Scheme, the Mail threatened the site with around £150,000 worth of legal action and a cease and desist in August 2011.

The Mail's Editor

The paper's former editor Paul Dacre emerged very rarely even during his time at the paper, which ran from 1992 to 2018. He almost never appears on television (or any other medium), and when he (rarely) writes overtly in the Mail, he is barely literate. For example, he manages to convert a (perhaps) valid point about press freedom into a personal, risible, incoherent diatribe against his enemies (The Guardian). How this secretive man claims to be an effective journalist is beyond any comprehension. Private Eye magazine refers to Dacre as "double cunting Dacre" due to his alleged habit of screaming such obscenities at staff who displease him. Dacre stepped down as Editor in 2018, still without the long-hoped-for Knighthood. Dacre's replacement was former Mail On Sunday editor Geordie Greig, who was in turn replaced in 2021 by Ted Verity. A truly outstanding example of reverse nominative determinism, that.

Writing staff

“”"And I'm shakin' in me shoes As I'm sending out the news," Said the man from the Daily Mail.

—Peadar Mac Ghiolla Chearra

The Daily Mail's writers are often known for being stubbornly vitriolic, all of whom can turn a fly taking a shit on a scrapheap into a national outrage that threatens the very fabric of society itself. Whenever a mass health scare happens, you can almost guarantee that these people write more words on the subject than any informed and qualified science correspondent.

Notable ideologues include:

• Boris Johnson — Joined the Mail after his political career came to an inglorious end. Has not yet had much of his content published, but his weekly column is said to be "uncensored" and is widely believed to be a platform for Johnson to attack Rishi Sunak despite Johnson's claims that it will not be political.
• Peter Hitchens — Hitchens was certainly at the forefront of bringing Tony Blair's son Leo into the arguments about the safety of the MMR vaccine; indeed, he went on about the kid and harassed Downing Street about it on an almost daily basis during the hoax. In more recent years, he's made an increasing number of anti-secularism rants.
• Melanie Phillips — A blogger once coined the phrase "I wouldn't wish it on anyone… except Melanie Phillips." She made George Monbiot's list of "top 10 climate change deniers." A regular panel guest on the BBC's long-running political debate show Question Time, where she gleefully trolls the audience with her witch-like views.
• Samantha Brick — Is constantly banging on about just how fucking beautiful she is. Gained notoriety for this in 2012 when one of her articles, about how hard it was to be such a stunning specimen of visual human perfection because other women hated her for it, swept through the blogosphere like a turd attached to a tumbleweed made of LOLcats.
• Amanda Platell — A professional preacher and generally rather horrible person.
• Richard Littlejohn — Returned to the Mail in 2005 after a £800,000 per year deal to write for The Sun. Has the honour of being titled "The Stupid Person's Jeremy Clarkson" and author of a book once described as a "recruiting pamphlet for the BNP." Amusingly parodied in Viz comic as 'Richard Littlecock', and curiously obsessed with the mechanics of male gay sex. Easily annoyed, when he launches into ill-informed rants based solely on his prejudices, and easily rebutted. Has long referred to that unnecessary burden on business, Health and Safety, as "elf 'n' safety", and the lefty scam, human rights, as "yuman rites", mocking their imagined pronunciation by manual workers and other lesser humans. His readers parrot these spellings without knowing why they do it. Littlejohn often falls back on parodying current events in the style of Only Fools and Horses, Dad's Army, The Sweeney or Minder in rotation according to suitability, which tend to be painfully unfunny. Having lived in the gated community of Vero Beach, Florida for some years (a fact apparently unknown to his fans), his articles about what's happening in his beloved city of London would seem to be based less on what he's hearing while downing pints in the Dog and Duck and more on what he reads in the Daily Mail. It might also explain why his UK cultural references seem to date no later than the 1980s.
• Quentin Letts — His crowning achievements so far are, firstly, the claim, repeated in his book 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, that Iraqi-born advertising executive and art connoisseur Charles Saatchi has done more damage to Britain than his countryman, the genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein. His second is trying to have an entire theatre shut down because he didn't much like a play they put on. Arsehole.
• David Rose — Elitist with eugenicist beliefs. Originally known for hyping Iraqi WMD stories, he later issued a partial "oops" for penning the stories. He then turned his skills to promoting global warming denial and got caught quote mining scientists and pushing denialist talking points numerous times.

Criminal activity

Press news website Byline Investigates has reported allegations of illegal information gathering at the Daily Mail in the 1990s and 2000s, such as phone hacking and the use of unscrupulous private detective firms. Mail journalist Richard Simpson reportedly boasted about using unlawful means including hacking voicemails to get stories on celebrities such as Paul McCartney, Kylie Minogue, Kate Moss, and golfer Colin Montgomery. Byline Investigates also claimed that journalist Victoria Newton wrote stories based on phone hacking while working at the Daily Mail, noting a pattern of suspicious reporting by Newton including knowledge of private phone calls.

The Mail on Sunday belatedly admitted that in the 1990s it stole documents from the home of businessman Michael Ward and paid witnesses at a criminal trial, leading to Ward being jailed.

Reliability as a news source

...

The Daily Mail was initially given a "red" status by Newsguard, Microsoft's new default browser add-on that will warn users about the reliability of various news sources. However after 'constructive' discussions with a Daily Mail executive, Newsguard was forced to walk-back their rating and instead apply a "green" rating to Daily Mail, indicating it upholds basic standards and integrity in journalism. The US-based outlet acknowledged, "We were wrong", and had been going by a popularly-held view of the Daily Mail rather than actually doing research into it.

Still, you've "got to be really bad to get a red" rating by Newsguard, according to their co-founder. As of 2021, the Mail received a "77 out of 100" score, placing them just between The Sun and ITV News.

Media Bias/Fact Check ranks Daily Mail's factual reporting as "low". For comparison, even Conservapedia and Breitbart are ranked as a "mixed" sources when it comes to factual reporting. Likewise, AllSides indicated that "the Daily Mail has a sensationalist, tabloid bent, often choosing to highlight individual stories that elicit shock or heightened emotions."

On Wikipedia

On 8 February 2017, a month-long discussion on English Wikipedia ended in a consensus that the Heil! was fit for use as toilet paper not a reliable source. In fact, it was "deprecated" - a new status meaning that it should not be used under almost any circumstances. The closing admin said, "The general themes of the support !votes centred on the Daily Mail's reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism, and flat-out fabrication. […] There are multiple thousands of existing citations to the Daily Mail. Volunteers are encouraged to review them, and remove/replace them as appropriate".

This event was widely reported in the media (usually with an attitude of barely suppressed outrage or alternatively, unrestrained hilarity neutral journalistic objectivity), with one difficult-to-explain exception. The editor who initiated the discussion was rapidly awarded three different Barnstars and announced starting a Wikibreak. (The praise didn't prevent the user from getting banned for abusing sock puppets a few years later nonetheless.)

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales concurred with the community's consensus, and said of the Daily Mail: "they've mastered the art of click bait, they've mastered the art of hyped up headlines, they've also mastered the art of, I'm sad to say, of running stories that simply aren't true". The Mail responded with a denial, and an accusation that Wikipedia is instead unreliable itself. As it happens, research indicates that Wikipedia (despite any given flaws) is about as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica and other traditionally published sources. The Mail, for its part, edited its own historical front pages. Comparatively, who comes out on top here?

In the years following, usages of the DM dropped from 30,000 in January 2017 to about 20 in 2021. Since 2017, many other sources have been labeled as unreliable on Wikipedia. Although a considerable part of these sources are overall considered far-right, some left-wing sources have also been banned (e.g. The Grayzone), as well as many anti-western state-owned media companies from China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. However, many right-wing sources like Fox News and New York Post are not banned. The criterion is: does this site post fabricated nonsense and conspiracy theories, and is it nevertheless used on a pile of Wikipedia articles? If so, it's probably out.

Best of the Daily Fail

A spoof Daily Mail front page.

Here is a selection of some of the best — for the wrong reasons — articles put out by the Daily Mail:

• "Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters: Moscow Orders to our Reds" (known as the Zinoviev letter) – the paper alleges that the damn commies were infiltrating the Labour Party in 1924. Labour lost this election to the Tories.
• "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!" was the Mail's front page headline on 8 July 1934. The article sets up a straw man, arguing that British people opposed fascism simply because "it comes from Italy"; it reminds the reader that football (soccer) came from Italy. Further, it argues to socialists that Marxism came from "the German Jew Karl Marx". Rothermere does cite Fascist Italy as a success story in reviving "national strength" through a "process of modernisation", along with Nazi Germany. However, despite the Mail's efforts, the British Union of Fascists never did achieve widespread popularity.
• In 1956, it described rock 'n' roll as "deplorable" and "tribal", adding that "it surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the Negro's revenge".
• "Yes, scientists do much good. But a country run by these arrogant gods of certainty would truly be hell on earth" — "The trouble with a 'scientific' argument, of course, is that it relies solely on empirical facts," which says enough.
• On 16 July 1993, the Mail ran with the headline, "Abortion Hope after 'Gay Genes' Finding." Whilst even this limited support for a woman's right to choose was daringly liberal for the Mail, its views on the circumstances of when abortion would be an appropriate choice were perhaps less enlightened.
• "Amanda Knox found guilty" — so the Mail decided to release the wrong pre-written story regarding the appeal of accused murderer Amanda Knox. Highlights include reactions from prosecutors who said they were delighted, a description of how she collapsed in a chair sobbing and would be placed on suicide watch. (Knox was actually declared "not-guilty" at the actual appeal, in case you missed the punchline.) The Mail wasn't the only paper to do this. The Sun also briefly had both versions of events on its website and both The Guardian and Sky News also jumped the gun with the wrong verdict, but didn't start making stuff up to fill the word count. The thing is, the fact that a false story contained so much detail immediately calls into question the veracity of the details contained in the correct version, as both were blatantly written before the fact with plausible and widely applicable details in place.
• "A strange, lonely and troubling death…" — the controversial article by Jan Moir on the death of Stephen Gately, known for being quite shockingly homophobic and leaping to conclusions as if Moir had suddenly become an expert coroner. The article was originally titled "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death."
• "Spare us the 'People's Prostitute' routine" — Richard Littlejohn uses his consistently distasteful column to remind his readers that five women murdered by a serial killer were prostitutes, and thus practically deserved it.
• Curiously absent from the Daily Mail's archives, in 1997, columnist Lynda Lee-Potter described Mo Mowlam, Labour MP and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, as an "only slightly effeminate Geordie trucker", due to her hair that looked like a wig and her recent weight gain. The paper was forced to apologise after it emerged that Mowlam had lost her hair due to cancer and that her weight gain was due to medication.
• "[I]f you're gay, then you are not a Tory" — A columnist for the Mail responded to government minister Alan Duncan's coming out as gay by describing homosexuality as "morally wrong" and a "choice", writing that acceptance of homosexuality as normal is "a principal cause of loneliness, misery, poverty, social breakdown, crime and violence".
• "Sex & The Country" (since deleted from the Mail's website) tracks the sexual antics of four women who moved from the city to the countryside. However, one of the participants recently wrote an extensive blog post refuting the piece, claiming outright lies, misquotation and sensationalism.
• "Teachers leave boy, 5, stranded in tree because of health and safety (then report passer-by who helped him down to police)" — an interesting story involving teachers who, due to "health and safety" regulations, didn't rescue a kid from a tree. Shame it's total bullshit.
• "EastEnders sparks uproar with gay bedroom scene before the watershed" — oh noes, you'll catch teh gay by watching the evul librul BBC!!!11 Of course, the "uproar" mentioned in the headline came exclusively from the Daily Mail itself.
• In September 2013 (and smeared out over more articles and opinion columns than are worth listing), the Mail attacked Labour Party leader Ed Miliband for having a father — the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband — who "hated Britain". This was ironic in numerous ways:

1. A key piece of "evidence" for this was the 17 year-old Ralph's diary that called the English "perhaps the most nationalist people in the world," which of course is something you could easily conclude after looking at the Mail;
2. Miliband was a staunch anti-Stalinist, so his political views look more like Orwell's than 'the Great Satan' that the Mail presented; and
3. Most staggeringly is a fact that the Mail would push such a smear campaign in the face of their own history in cosying up to Adolf "the Great" Hitler and the National Front. Ralph Miliband, on the other hand, fled to the UK in 1940 to avoid anti-Semitic persecution, enlisted in the Royal Navy, and served in the D-Day landings. This prompted a particularly public savaging by Mehdi Hasan on the BBC's Question Time programme, a pwnage which in turn prompted the Daily Mail to respond with a smear campaign against Hasan that did everything but outright say "that muzzie towelhead should go back where he came from." The Daily Mail doubled down after the election to claim that "a source within the Labour Party" had revealed that had Ed Miliband won he intended to have a 100 foot high bust of himself carved into the White Cliffs of Dover. This was later amended to the cliffs of Cheddar Gorge, but interestingly not one other media outlet ran this incredible story of Stalinistic hubris. Readers were not put off by the unlikelihood of this egregious lie, one commenting that it didn't surprise him and that "You couldn't make it up".

• In 2014, the Mail referred to the perpetrators of Northern Ireland's Bloody Sunday massacre as "our brave Paras" and demanded they not be prosecuted for the crime.
• One of their most egregious uses of faked imagery was to support an almost entirely false story about a "white Christian" girl in London "forced to live with a Muslim foster family". To stir up the outrage further the Mail printed a photo intended for their readers to believe was the girl and her Muslim foster carers. Instead it was a stock photo of a happy Muslim family walking in a Dubai park, carefully cropped to remove obviously non-London buildings, and with a full veil crudely added for enhanced "sinister" effect.

Broken clock moment

See the main article on this topic: Stopped clock

Despite its share of stupid news, Daily Mail also has its moments of shining journalism. The newspaper published an exposé on how British billionaire financier Nat Rothschild treated British Labour minister and EU commissioner Lord Mandelson with a private jet and luxury dining to meet his Russian pal Oleg Deripaska. Not coincidentally, Oleg Deripaska owned an aluminum plant that exported the metal to Europe. Nat Rothschild, being the skinny billionaire he is, sued the paper for libel, but a High Court judge sided with the paper and threw out the lawsuit.

Following the infamous acquittal of the five white youths responsible for the hate crime murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, the Mail released (and continuously reprinted) a front page denouncing the suspects as murderers and daring them to sue the paper. The headline is believed to have increased media attention to the case, resulting in an inquiry that exposed institutional racism in the police force and two of the previously acquitted suspects being retried and convicted.

Barney Calman, the health editor for the Daily Mail, has written some rational articles. In 2019, he criticized the statin denialism of Malcolm Kendrick, Zoë Harcombe and Aseem Malhotra as dangerous misinformation.

See also

• Fake news
• Family values
• Nationalism
• Penultimate paragraph syndrome
• WND

External links

• Tea and kittens — An add-on for most browsers. If anyone sends you in the direction of the Mail, this will redirect you to far more calming material.
• The Daily Mail moral underground map
• Hear Me Wail — a Tumblr photo blog. A description in their own words: "Pictures of people on the Daily Mail website looking sad while holding, or standing close to, the thing that has made them feel sad." It would seem that the Daily Mail's readership is a rather sad lot, indeed.
• 10 Egregiously False Stories in the Daily Mail
• Kill or cure? — the aforementioned compilation of all the things The Daily Mail claims cause or prevent cancer, sometimes both.
• The pedophilia is coming from inside the house!!
• Are You HATED by the Daily Mail?

Videos

• Why the Daily Mail is Evil^{[dead link]}
• Daily Mail Island!
• Dan and Dan present — The Daily Mail Song
• Another song about the Mail
• And another from Amanda Palmer responding to their dismal coverage of her concert
• Piers Morgan's co-host screaming internally