Daily Mail CSP

Tabloid discourse:

Incidents in everyday life are stripped out of context and taken to signify something else. Such stories are presented as standing for moral collapse, and ‘all that’s wrong with this country’.
A child breaking a window, a Muslim youth arrested for carrying a knife, an asylum seeker being convicted of abusing housing welfare.
Considered outside this tabloid discourse, something else might be discovered. Perhaps the Muslim youth felt threatened, had been a victim of gang culture allowed to flower because of cuts in neighbourhood policing. Perhaps the child is a bullying or abuse survivor, working through frustration. Perhaps the asylum seeker abused the welfare system because of the pressures of the underground or gig economy they are forced to work in due to a lack of legal work and benefits. All of these things are possible, and would come to mind in a suspension of mediated judgement.
But mythologies are geared towards instant judgements: ‘this means that’. They produce instant responses: crack down, punish, restore ‘order’. In such cases, crackdowns serve mainly to restore the sense of order which is ruptured by the disaster itself, by finding human scapegoats.

History of the Daily Mail

• 1896: Established by Alfred and Harold Harmsworth who later became two of the most famous names in newspaper history as Viscount Rothermere and Viscount Northcliffe.
• The paper from inception was unashamedly populist - former Prime Minister Lord Salisbury called it ‘a paper by office boys for office boys’.
• At one point (1902) it was the largest circulating newspaper in the world.
• Industrially innovative, it was the first UK national newspaper to print in two locations – Manchester and London saving time
  and costs.
• WW1 accused of stirring up pro-war feelings.
• 1917: Lloyd George felt Northcliffe so powerful he was approached to join the government in the hope of stopping criticism.
• 1924: Published Zinoviev letter – a forged letter claiming that Russian style violent revolution was planned for UK. This lead to widespread anti-communist feelings in the UK.
• 1929: Rothermere launched his own political party, thinking conservatives were too weak. The United Empire Party dominated the paper for two years.
• Rothermere’s infamous 1933 leader “Youth Triumphant” praised Hitler and the Nazi regime’s accomplishments, and used as propaganda.
• Mail supported Hitler and took pro stance during the thirties. Actively supported British fascists and urged recruitment.
• During WW2 it was said to be unreliable in its reporting as its…