"Mail Supremacy" - from the New Yorker

[NickFitz]

How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker

Interesting look at some people's newspaper of choice from across the pond.

[Diver]

How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker

Interesting look at some people's newspaper of choice from across the pond.

>The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers<

Does that sound a bit CUKish or is it just me?

[TimberWolf]

Someone read it and report back.

[xoggoth]

Hmmmmm!

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[Lockhouse]

Good article for a US newspaper. The newspapers I've read when I've been in the US have been unremitting crap. Apart from when I got my picture in the Key West Times for catching an 8ft sailfish.

[Diver]

Hmmmmm!

Mail Supremacy
The newspaper that rules Britain.by Lauren Collins

April 2, 2012 .The Daily Mail has 4.5 million readers. One editor says, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.”

On Thursday, January 19th, the front page of the Daily Mail carried a story about Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. During Goodwin’s tenure, from 2000 to 2008, R.B.S. quadrupled its assets, became the fifth-largest bank in the world, and then failed spectacularly, at a cost to British taxpayers of seventy billion dollars. The Mail illustrated the piece with a large photograph of Goodwin. He was dressed in hunting gear, with a shotgun hanging over the crook of his left elbow. “Reviled: Sir Fred Goodwin,” the caption read. Any further doubt about the Mail’s stance was relieved by the headline: “STRIP FRED ‘THE SHRED’ OF TAINTED KNIGHTHOOD DEMAND MPS.” The exclusive story, the latest in a series of unflattering pieces about Goodwin, revealed that Prime Minister David Cameron was “sympathetic” to the idea that the honor should be revoked. Two weeks later, Goodwin became the only Knight Bachelor in memory to lose his commission without having been censured by a professional body or convicted of a criminal offense. “Fred Goodwin joined the ranks of Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu last night when his knighthood was removed by order of the Queen,” the Mail announced.

The Mail is the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain. A middle-market tabloid, with a daily readership of four and a half million, it reaches four times as many people as the Guardian, while being taken more seriously than the one paper that outsells it, the Sun. In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.” Nor is the Mail easy to resist. Last year, its lawyers shut down a proxy site that allowed liberals to browse Mail Online without bumping up its traffic.

The Mail presents itself as the defender of traditional British values, the voice of an overlooked majority whose opinions inconvenience the agendas of metropolitan élites. To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. (“WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD,” a recent headline warned.) A Briton’s view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters. In 2010, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with “The Daily Mail Song,” which, so far, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. “Bring back capital punishment for pedophiles / Photo feature on schoolgirl skirt styles / Binge Britain! Single Mums! / Pensioners! Hoodie Scum!” Dan sings. “It’s absolutely true because I read it in the Daily Mail.” The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers.



Read more How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker

[lilelvis2000]

>The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers<

Does that sound a bit CUKish or is it just me?

Surely the editor of The Mail thinks otherwise. Even she is a cretin with an incredibly wide tar brush.

[NotAllThere]

Tossing the words "the Daily Wail" into a conversation is an easy, but possibly dangerous way of outing the DM fans. They don't like it.

[Zoiderman]

It's a nice insult though, like Could you be more of a black shirt...

Or, wow, I thought only ex booties said tulip like that.

As soon as you out a DM reader, you know what you're going to get.

[NotAllThere]

It's a nice insult though, like Could you be more of a black shirt...

Or, wow, I thought only ex booties said tulip like that.

As soon as you out a DM reader, you know what you're going to get.

At a family reunion some distant cousin was spouting on about immigration, asylum seekers etc. During a pause, I asked him "Do you read the Daily Mail?".

Everyone else laughed and he wouldn't speak to me again. Which was definitely a good result.