Kill the Daily Mail

We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. (Martin Luther King, Jr., April 1967)

Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy. (George Carlin)

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It’s that time again – another post about the Daily Mail. In this, I shall attempt to answer the question I put at the end of another entry: What to do about the Daily Mail? It is my intention to convince you, should you need convincing, that the rag in question is a malign influence on social discourse in this country, and one that must be countered. Join me as I journey into the murky world of the Mail in print and online; a trek through the outer reaches of sanity. So, further up and further in…

We're not in... YES I KNOW I'M MIXING MY CULTURAL REFERENCES.

Audience and readership

The Daily Mail has an average daily circulation of over two million. Readership is over four and a half million, concentrated in the middle classes and skilled working class. Research has shown that the Mail can influence the political and economic views of certain sections of its readership, while researchers at Oxford University have noted the power of the tabloids to shape opinion on climate change. They commented further that ‘the Daily Mail was more divergent from the scientific consensus than other tabloid newspapers’.

The possible link between effect on public opinion and high circulation appears to be a common assumption and historically, newspapers have had an ability to persuade. Maxwell E. McCombs notes:

For nearly all the concerns on the public agenda, citizens deal with a second-hand reality, a reality that is structured by journalists’ reports about these events and situations.

So far; so obvious. The mass media is able to shape public opinion, including on important subjects like the environment. Therefore, coverage which is false or misleading may be said to have a negative effect on the views of a paper’s readership, as regards a full understanding of a given subject.

The Daily Mail’s problematic reporting

At this point I could simply give you a link to the Mail Online homepage and tell you to go and browse; however, it suits my purpose better to discuss the Mail’s journalistic failings in more detail.

1. On climate change

Prior to delving into the malevolent lucky-dip which is tabloid coverage of global warming, I should state: climate change is definitely happening, and we are causing it. Ready?

Examples abound of the Daily Mail’s denial, twisting and misrepresentation of this important truth. Here, The Mail on Sunday is shown to have misrepresented the findings of climate scientist Mojib Latif regarding the effect of ocean temperature on global temperature. The Guardian said:

Despite clarifications from the scientists at the time, who stressed that the research did not challenge the predicted long-term warming trend, the study was widely misreported as signaling a switch from global warming to global cooling.

Ben Goldacre has exposed the Mail’s use of a 2007 speech by Pope Benedict to put forward its denialist message, saying, ‘The pope takes a right on, evidence based line.’

@atomic_spin , another crusader against bad science reporting, has criticised the Mail’s misuse of the scientific term ‘uncertainty’:

The word “uncertainty” has a special meaning in science, quite different to its normal everyday meaning. If I say that I am uncertain about my future, or what to have for tea tonight,* then it might mean that I am “undecided” or “unsure”. If however I do an experiment and I say that there are uncertainties in my data, that does not mean I am undecided or unsure about the results, or that the whole thing was a waste of time.

Unsurprisingly, one of the Mail’s best-remunerated contributors and ‘squawking buffoon’, Richard Littlejohn, is often at the forefront of climate change denial, as reported by Tabloid Watch and Anton Vowl.

Currently only 31% of adults believe that ‘climate change is “definitely” a reality’. According to the research discussed above, the Daily Mail is helping to keep that number low.

2. On women

I have previously accused the Mail of having a problem with women, and their website of exhibiting ‘an odd brand of puritan voyeurism (or should that be voyeuristic puritanism?)’ as regards women’s physical appearance.

For example, Mail Online recently reported on the fact that an actress has aged since the 1980s (‘Erika Eleniak is no longer a fresh-faced beauty’). This tactic also works in reverse, as the Angry Mob points out.

The paper’s coverage of the ageing process on Friday 12th concerned Emma Watson (front page; p. 9), who has ‘blossomed’ since ‘she was just a nervous 11-year-old’; now she is a ‘confident and vivacious young woman’ to whose ‘revealing black see-through dress’ the reporters pay detailed attention.

Emma Watson is big news for the Daily Mail

In other news, the Mail is currently in trouble for invading a 10 year-old girl’s privacy:

The Prosecutor of Sevilla has sent to the Attorney General’s office an article published in the British newspaper ‘The Daily Mail’ on the 10 year old girl who has given birth in the province, to undertake a prosecution for violating an executive order to protect her privacy.

The Mail’s online coverage of [insert name of female celebrity here] further illustrates my point. Today, Katy Perry has ‘killer curves’; a month ago, she ‘was looking a little curvier than usual’ as her dress ‘clung in all the wrong places’. A couple of weeks later, she was ‘a right cracker’.

Perhaps the most irritatingly hypocritical of the Daily Mail’s approaches to images of women is its ‘deplore-something-but-provide-pictures-of-it’ trick. An example of this published on Friday 12th (p. 27) concerns the PricewaterhouseCoopers ‘top ten’ email list of female accountancy trainees. Alongside a disapproving report on the ‘crude’ comments attached to the emails, the Daily Mail has of course run pictures of all the women, with their names underneath. It also dug into the Twitter feed of one woman, and commented:

All of the young women come from respectable backgrounds and have university educations.

Does this imply that were their backgrounds different, such actions on the part of their colleagues would be acceptable?

Primly Stable and others have criticised this pictures-plus-disapproval approach:

As has been pointed out on countless occasions by countless members of what I should probably call the “tabloid-watching community”, the Daily Mail website (motto: “News is far more important to us that showbiz. News is what drives our site”) likes nothing more than publishing pictures of young ladies in various states of undress.

As the Angry Mob has noted, this trend extends, disturbingly, to reporting on the bikini-clad antics of children. Yes, really. To whom does this kind of destructive reporting on females appeal? Women cannot win with the Mail’s alternately leering and derogatory reporting.

3. On science generally

Ben Goldacre has joked that if the Daily Mail goes out of business, he will have to give up his column, and describes the Daily Mail as the ‘home of the health scare’. It is not hard to see why: there exists a website dedicated to cataloguing the things that the Mail declares either cause or cure cancer. I simply don’t have time to go through the many examples of science mis-reporting, so we will focus on just a few.

The Mail’s participation in the media-generated furore over the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine has come in for criticism from many quarters, including from the British Medical Journal.  The incidence of measles in England and Wales rose in 2008, but the Mail is still publishing articles suggesting the vaccine causes autism (it doesn’t).

In this truly excellent rant the estimable Dr Goldacre explains how yo-yoing media reports on health matters can influence public opinion on science and scientists (citing research commissioned by the World Cancer Research Fund). He also notes that the UK version of the Mail has campaigned against the recent HPV vaccine, while its Irish counterpart has done the opposite. The Daily Quail has further analysis of the Mail’s HPV coverage.

Reporting on science and health matters, then, can be suspect. This extends from major stories to coverage of niche, alternative therapies.

The Mail’s Good Health section is extremely popular with advertisers, and the newspaper is quick to tout the benefits of buying its ad space. Points of interest to us include:

• Of the Daily Mail’s 4.9 million readers, 3 million take an active interest in the paper’s Health section.
• Good Health appears in the Daily Mail every Tuesday and is a key circulation driver.
• Anecdotes abound from health professionals on how [the Mail’s] readers often quote the Daily Mail when discussing their health issues.

Remembering these will become important very shortly.

Advertising in the Good Health classified section costs (pdf) £107.50 per column centimeter. That means that an advert roughly the size of one sealed condom (sorry, it’s all I could find) will cost £645 – the girth — sorry, width — of one column multiplied by the depth in centimetres. There are four columns per page.

Those who recommend using the this advertising space include a lucrative plastic surgery company (pdf) and Magnopulse, a company which specialises ‘in Drug-Free Pain Relief and Holistic Magnetic Therapy’.

According to their testimonial, the company has used the Daily Mail to advertise its LadyCare product, which it says ‘may help to reduce, or completely eliminate the symptoms of menopause’ by the use of a magnet. The only evidence provided for this claim is a 508-woman ‘consumer survey’ by one Dr. Nyjon Eccles, unpublished in a scientific or medical journal and peer-reviewed by Dr Kim Jobst, a homeopath ‘whose work is guided always by the directives of Spirit’. Participants were recruited through an advertisement in the Daily Mail.

Magnopulse was rebuked in 2007 by the Office of Fair Trading, which considered that ‘a number of the company’s old advertising claims were misleading under the Control of Misleading Advertisements Regulations’.

Image offered without comment.

The company’s owner, Derek Price, told me on Friday that the other study listed on this page (a ‘double-blind trial and survey’) has not taken place due to current research, to be submitted for publication in mid-December, which he expects will vindicate his claims for the efficacy of his magnet-related products. He also told me that he does not ‘believe in double-blind trials’ as a means of testing potential treatments. In addition, Mr Price lamented the skepticism towards alternative therapies which he feels is widespread in the British medical profession; he believes that this is in part due to the influence of large drug companies.

In March 2007 the Mail Online ran a story on LadyCare, in which it repeated many of Magnopulse’s dubious claims and even provided a phone number for the company alongside a web address. I don’t know if extra charges were levied for this kind of advertising, but I would be most interested to find out. After advertising with the Daily Mail, sales of LadyCare experienced ‘major spikes’.

Occasionally, the Mail runs a good science article. On Friday 12th (can you guess which print edition I bought yet?) there was a piece (p. 11) which rightly decried the attempted use of Britain’s awful libel laws to stifle Dr Dalia Nield’s criticism of ‘[a] cream that claims to give women bigger breasts’. Rhys Morgan has the details. Science editor Michael Hanlon denounced this as a ‘sinister bid to silence science’.

The Mail’s approach to science reporting  is justified on page 14 (Friday 12th), where an editorial says:

the Press must be free to publish comment on issues of public interest without fear of hugely expensive court cases brought under draconian libel laws

The stifling of honest debate serves only those with something to hide.

Yes, honest debate. If the evidence points overwhelmingly to one side (climate change, MMR), misrepresenting, denying and twisting it to provoke readers is not honest. I might equally level that charge against advertising products for which evidence is flimsy at best, to an apparently very receptive audience.

These, of course, are not the only areas in which Daily Mail reporting can be said to be misleading or destructive. Coverage of social issues is an important area which other media blogs do an excellent job of dissecting: this post on race is a first-rate example.

How, and why

In his book, Tabloid Britain: constructing a community through language, Martin Conboy describes how in the 19th century, periodicals addressed the ‘common people’ ‘in a direct vernacular aimed at constructing a tangible, effective and radical political community.’ He says that modern tabloids use a ‘popular variety of language’ ‘which enables a ‘greater proximity to the lifeworld of the audience”, and that this is a reason for their commercial success. Additionally:

Newspaper readerships simulate [a social community] and particularly within the popular press that community is marketed through a rhetoric which attempts to capture a flavour of the speech and tastes of the readers.

Sound familiar? Forced puns, odd usage of language: par for the course at the Daily Mail. A sprinkling of hyperbole completes the picture.

Notice the word ‘marketed’. If Conboy is correct in his assessment, then it may be said that the Daily Mail consciously manipulates language to create marketing opportunities within its readership. What is it selling? An ideology? A moral viewpoint? Or just newspapers?

 

*cough*

Quoted by Conboy, S J Taylor has said that ‘tabloid journalism is the direct application of capitalism to events and ideas. Profit, not ethics, is the prevailing motivation’. Reviewing the evidence presented here and elsewhere, one finds it hard to disagree. The Mail may take a stance on an issue, but I suspect it is not for any reason other than profit.

Des Kelly has commented that:

You can’t ignore anything in the Daily Mail, even if you want to. The editor Paul Dacre understands his market better than any rival. The day I joined, he said, “Make them laugh, make them cry, or make them angry”, which isn’t a bad template for a columnist.

It appears to me, and perhaps it appears to you, that the Daily Mail is merely a vehicle for financial gain. There are no deeply-held beliefs; no heartfelt desires to impart knowledge or a moral lesson. Behind the garish façade of tits, bile and glaring contradictions, lies only money.

Lots of it, too. The Mail is owned by Associated Newspapers Ltd which has revenues of £931m, which is itself part of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc.; annual revenue, over £2 billion.

It will never be enough, though: a company exists to produce more wealth for its owners. How it does that is, evidently, of not too great a concern. The private lives and welfare of celebrities and ordinary people are, as we have seen, subordinated to the profit motive. Truth and accuracy also fall victim to this most attractive of lures. So…

What to do about the Daily Mail?

I don’t want to preach only to the converted on this point. The likelihood is that, if you are reading this (and if you’ve managed to get this far, thank you) then you share my opinion of the Mail. If that is the case, then I would like to ask you: please share this article with others. Introduce them to the media blogs I link to in the sidebar (somewhere way up there ↑) and encourage them to think critically about what they read in the papers. If you know someone who reads the Mail, point them this way.

The only way to destroy something in a capitalist society is to deprive it of money. If this article convinces a few people to stop buying the Daily Mail, I shall be happy.