Dacre's Mail on the Run

[Denzil_DC]

Multi-millionaire legendarily foul-mouthed (I won't reproduce his favourite term of abuse on DU, but Google him if you must) Paul Dacre is the editor of the UK's Daily Mail (the Mail on Sunday has a different editor, Geordie Greig, who's a bit less rabid than Dacre on most things, and there's no love lost between the two).

If you're not familiar with him, here's a Guardian profile:

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Paul Dacre: the most dangerous man in Britain?

Paul Dacre is the Daily Mail's low-profile editor. To some - including many in government - he is a malign force, using his paper to hound minorities and other vulnerable targets, and savage liberalism in any form. To others he is the most gifted journalist of his generation, a moral man with his finger on the pulse of Middle England. Andy Beckett went in search of the truth

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/feb/22/dailymail.pressandpublishing

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He and the Mail can dish it out with great big shovels, but they're snowflakes when it comes to criticism of themselves. And he seems even more sensitive right now with the Tories in disarray (despite the sinister headline about May "crushing" her enemies you may remember from before the election and the umpteen pages of character assassination aimed at Corbyn it published on election day itself) and his favoured hard Brexit seemingly in doubt.

The Guardian's Martin Rowson published a cartoon earlier in the week after the Finsbury Park attack that seems to have triggered Dacre bigly. Here it is, along with the Mail's editorial reaction (I won't add to vast number of the clicks Mail Online gets by linking any of their content in this thread, so you'll need to Google it if you want to see the originals):





And there's more:



The reaction online has been pretty spectacular:

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Link to tweet

LBC ✔ @LBC

Paul Dacre claims the Daily Mail & MailOnline are different entities. @mrjamesob took just 1 minute to demolish that http://l-bc.co/NbpeuR

James O'Brien Demolishes Dacre's MailOnline Claim
The Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre argued that the Daily Mail and MailOnline are different entities. James O'Brien took 90 seconds to demolish that claim.
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Link to tweet

James O'Brien ✔ @mrjamesob

Paul Dacre seems to be in receipt of a large payment directly linked to his involvement with Mail Online. At odds with today's op-ed?
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If you want to keep up with the Twitter backlash (some very funny, and far too much of it to post here), you'll find loads if you do a Twitter search: https://twitter.com/search?q=dacre&src=typd

(X-posted on General Discussion, since we have some Mail Online fans on DU: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029237197 )

[T_i_B]

1. Whilst the general election result was a kick in the teeth for the tabloids...

...with online sources such as The Canary making more of the running and the Tory election campaign they were in hock to backfiring, I would wait until they take a severe nosedive in circulation before writing the tabloids off as a political force.

Lots of people are condemning the Daily Fail's hypocrisy and blatant lying today, but will their readership actually notice?

I say that as somebody who hasn't brought a newspaper in a long long while, and only broke the habit of not reading a newspaper on the Saturday after the election, with family, for schadenfreude purposes. The tabloids may not deserve a penny of support, but how long will they hang onto their aging readership for?

[Denzil_DC]

2. It's always been a question how much influence a newspaper's endorsement has

on its readers' votes. Here's one recent survey:

How daily newspaper readers voted by title in the 2017 general election

Voting largely follows political endorsements by each title ahead of the election, which were as follows:

Telegraph – Tory
Daily Mail – Tory
Daily Express – Tory
Sun – Tory
Times – Tory
FT – Tory
Daily Star – Undeclared
Daily Mirror – Labour
Guardian – Labour
Independent – Undeclared



http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/how-daily-newspaper-readers-voted-by-title-in-the-2017-general-election/

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That raises the question of chicken and egg, of course.

I guess a breakdown of TV viewing habits (especially news) might be interesting, too, but broadcast networks in the UK don't endorse (despite whatever agendas we might discern), and cable and satellite would complicate the picture nowadays.

People's reasons for buying a daily paper vary anyway. My brother and sister-in-law take the Mail, with a degree of outward embarrassment, and supposedly "for the sudoku". That didn't stop me getting an entirely unexpected (my brother's always claimed to be a liberal/"international socialist" if it's ever come up) good few earfuls of propaganda about the vile SNP, yay Brexit and "my pal in Wolverhampton says he can't hear an English accent when he walks down the street" the last time I visited Newcastle (it may be a while before I visit again, sadly ...). Others may like particular sports pages and thinly excused pics of ladies, scantily clad or not, or whatever, and claim to take no notice of the paper's editorial line, but I suspect something seeps through the newsprint.

[Denzil_DC]

3. This is quite clever:

Somebody mocked up the MailOnline front page, substituting snippets from its online comment sections for the headlines:

Link to tweet

TechnicallyRon ✔ @TechnicallyRon

Today's copy of 'The Daily Mail but with all the headlines replaced with real user comments' is as worrying as usual