Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Hidden Article

This posting has been hidden because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines.

IMC UK is an interactive site offering inclusive participation. All postings to the open publishing newswire are the responsibility of the individual authors and not of IMC UK. Although IMC UK volunteers attempt to ensure accuracy of the newswire, they take no responsibility legal or otherwise for the contents of the open publishing site. Mention of external web sites or services is for information purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation.

Why I read the Daily Mail

Robin Cook | 11.04.2013 20:01 | Gender

I once rang the Daily Mail to mildly complain about a story I had a connection with. The journalist I spoke to put me on hold while he conferred with a colleague. At least, he thought he put me on hold. But courtesy of him hitting the wrong button, I got to hear what they were saying. And it wasn’t exactly a master class in concern for accuracy. Yet I still read the newspaper regularly.

Why? Because it would be foolish not to.

1. The Daily Mail is read by 4.6 million people, making it by some margin the most read daily national newspaper. And that’s without even getting into its website, which is now the most popular newspaper website in the world. You can’t be interested in what the media is saying and ignore it.

2. Very large numbers of Liberal Democrat voters read it: around 576,00 Daily Mail readers voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, a number only topped by the 796,000 or so Sun readers who voted Liberal Democrat. That Daily Mail figure is more than the equivalent figures for The Guardian and The Independent put together.

3. The Daily Mail invests heavily in its journalistic resources. Whatever you may think of how they write-up their stories, its journalists frequently break stories due to having the time to do the old-fashioned legwork. Its record in breaking stories about dodgy Labour donations under Gordon Brown was a classic example: the Mail unearthed the story because it sent journalists door-to-door calling on Labour donors until they found something.

4. And then there’s the question of how the stories are written up… In my view, all manner of stories end up being written up in a distorted manner, but you can usually do a reasonable job of extracting the truth from a Mail political story by:

Ignore the headline: it often exaggerates so much for effect that it doesn’t really match the story.
Read the first line to get what the story is about, and then read the story from the end upwards: there is often a defence included in the story towards the end which undermines what goes before. Although I’ve read plenty of their stories on political topics which I know about and thought the headline and first-half of the story was distorted, I’ve not (yet) come across one of these where the second-half didn’t provide the explanation as to why the story was wrong.
Watch out carefully for who is quoted to support the story. The usual structure of the political scandal story is to have a quote from an opposition politician, often calling for an inquiry. There are some, from all parties – such as Vince Cable in the example linked to above – who have a track record of only calling for an inquiry or condemning someone when they have very good grounds to. Then there are others seemingly will happily condemn something based on the merest prod of encouragement from a journalist.
Apply these three tests and you can do pretty well at getting to the truth of a Daily Mail political story. I’ve seen plenty of devastating demolitions of Mail political stories, but those have all been ones where these three tests had warned me already. Of course, one day there’ll be a story that breaks all these rules, and all this leaves aside the question of what stories to choose to run in the first place…

Robin Cook

Comments

Display the following 2 comments

  1. Here's a story — printworks
  2. Distaseful — Lorre
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech