The Lesson: “IMMIGRANT chavs MAY or MAY NOT be responsible for causing CANCER, so take your mind off it with a FREE DVD of a Harrison Ford film which no-one cared about when it was released and hasn’t since.”
Still here? Suit yourself. 6 Lessons learned from The Daily Mail (complete with sensationalist headlines)…
1: The Lesson: The country is full of immigrants.
I’m going to start with an obvious thing that people typically associate with The Daily Mail. Illegal immigrants. Typing the word ‘immigrants’ into the search bar on the Daily Mail website yields 2304 results. Including this chestnut:
“Hundreds of illegal immigrants armed with knives and crowbars swarm around Calais trucks heading for Britain”.
I have no intention of picking apart the headline to comment on its overtly provocative language (or the parallels drawn between immigrants and locusts), but this conjures images of a dystopian future. In fact, I’m pretty certain I saw this scene in V for Vendetta.
Whilst I can understand the concerns over the influx of migrant workers into the UK, particularly when they are illegal immigrants and hence it is difficult to regulate or even calculate their numbers. I still cannot see how it is necessary or constructive to use headlines such as the one above to voice said concerns. Except, of course, that it sells more papers.
2: The Lesson: Everything causes cancer.
If there is one thing The Daily Mail loves more than immigrants, its cancer. Again, using the search bar on their site to see how many results can be found, Cancer gives 11000 results. A large amount of these are telling you things that will give you cancer.
There is a list of 20 of the oddest here, and this list includes: wine, oral sex, chips, sausages, burgers, chocolate, Pringles, sun cream and vitamin E.
And in a move proving that The Daily Mail is not afraid to embrace the 21st Century, it published this article:
“How using facebook could raise your risk of cancer”
Being an avid user of facebook, I simply had to read this. What if I found that every minute on facebook was equivalent to spending a minute out in the mid-day sun in Corsica? What if I discovered that every time I logged onto facebook, my life was reduced by 5 minutes?
Well it turns out that the situation isn’t as bad as the headline suggests- its not just facebook, it’s a general lack of face-to-face contact that causes health problems. So officially this blog causes cancer.
According to the article- which despite the shocking headline seems to focus as much on social effects on children as facebook's cancer giving credentials- “[‘socially regulated’ genes] activities may account for higher rates of inflammatory disease and other health problems seen in socially isolated individuals”. Note the use of the word ‘may’, which absolves The Daily Mail from blame should it be proven later (after further research) that social isolation has no link to cancer. The rest of the article lacks much in the way of research evidence actually linking said genes to cancer. In fact, the only quantitative figures quoted are regarding the social implications caused by electronic media.
Sadly it is not atypical for a scientific article in The Daily Mail to lack conviction…
3: The Lesson: Scientific articles can be about as scientific as a L’Oreal advert and still be published.
As it seems to be my benchmarking tool for this particular post, I again used the search bar on The Daily Mail website to search for the word ‘could’. Limited to the health pages, the search found 10600 articles. Half of these were dangling the tantalising possibility of miracle cures for cancer, motor neurone disease, Alzheimer’s or pretty much any other ailment you care to mention. Meanwhile, the other half suggest that a particular study has linked one of the above diseases to an utterly banal cause, or sometimes even a cure for something else- such as MMR vaccines causing autism, which was later proven not to be the case. For the record, searching a less ambiguous term such as ‘proven’ returned only 482 articles.
Thankfully I do not suffer from an incurable disease, and I’m not related to anyone with a severely debilitating illness such as multiple sclerosis, but I’m fairly certain if I was either a relative or sufferer, I wouldn’t appreciate having a potential cure waved around in front of me by a newspaper, years before it could be brought to market, or before the efficacy of it could even be proven.
On the other hand, the widely publicised ‘link’ between MMR and autism has caused damage to the image of the jab, causing many parents to forego it, putting their children at risk. Apparently the rate of children affected by measles is increasing and I’m going to suggest it could be linked to the reduced levels of children being inoculated against it.
Surely it would be better to ensure that a link is definitive before going to the trouble of telling millions of people about it, particularly when it can heavily impact their lives.
4: The Lesson: Everyone in television is evil. Grab your pitchforks and torches and march on their ivory tower.
The last few months have been an interesting time for Britain, many age-old institutions are starting to show cracks; television and radio presenters, bankers, even politicians (I know, I didn’t believe it either) have been found to be lying, stealing and cheating. Fortunately there has been one format that has proven itself trustworthy enough to publicise the awful transgressions that have occurred right under our very noses. Acting as part whistle-blower, part shoulder to cry on (via their forums and letter sections), and several thousand parts mob-ringleader, newspapers have, on several occasions, been responsible for whipping up a frenzied rabble who then abandoned all sense of scope and reason and mobilised to march on whichever institution had crossed them.
A perfect example of this is the ‘Sachsgate’ scandal which affected the BBC, particularly Russel Brand and Jonathan Ross, a few months ago (if you don’t know what it was, go away and google it, I’ll wait), despite going out to a limited number of people- prompting a negligible number of complaints- newspapers such as The Daily Mail got their teeth into the story. Then proceeded to drag it into a river and perform several death rolls. The complaints about the programme started coming in, mostly from people who hadn’t even heard the original broadcast.
All of a sudden you couldn’t turn a television on without hearing a septuagenarian bleating that Ross is overpaid, a young person gleefully exalting the edginess of Russell Brand’s unique variety of comedy, or a politician attempting to agree with one of these two demographics in the hope of securing their vote. Still, its taken our minds off all that cancer we're getting.
In the words of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ (presumably not a reference to the newspaper) “don’t speak too soon for the wheel’s still in spin”. This would have been reasonable advice for the newspapers, as the focus has been shifted onto them, and with the News of the World currently mired in accusations of phone tapping, it will be interesting to see who is going to bite the bullet next…
5: The Lesson: A picture is worth a thousand words, and if there isn’t a good one to hand, use an irrelevant one. Or Photoshop one.
A site which I regularly read (whilst giving myself cancer by not talking to real people) recently featured this rather wonderful blog, which helped fill me with enough ire to write this post. Anyway, this blog details some rather ‘creative’ uses of imagery in The Daily Mail, in order to tell a story.
Look at this picture:
and then this...
According to the mail, they are the same event, a vitriol-fuelled Islamic anti-war protest directed at homecoming soldiers. Despite the fact that they took place weeks apart, for different reasons (the bottom picture is in fact a picture of a peaceful event which was in no way linked to the top picture- and the story being printed- other than the fact it contained a gathering of Muslims) the bottom picture was still used in the article.
A complaint was made to the Press Complaints Commission and The Daily Mail issued this response:
“On May 25, 2009, we published an article ‘Nine arrested after masked mob’s march against Muslim extremists turns violent’, in which we inadvertently included an archive photograph of a peaceful unconnected parade held in Luton some weeks earlier. We are happy to clarify that this march had in fact passed without incident and regret our error in wrongly captioning the photograph.”
So thats extremist (and since the Mail sees no distinction between them, rather less extremist) Muslims dealt with. How about something that The Daily Mail actually likes? How about celebrities?
Now to be fair, this isn't a photo taken from a serious article, this is from a lighthearted article showing celebrities that have been made fatter through the wonders of photoshop. I'm not certain that celebrities being made fatter through the wonders of modern technology is news, but at least they're not attempting to apply their photoshop skills to actual news.
Oh.
This photo was eventually taken down after a complaint suggested that it could be misleading. This seems to be something of a trend, The Daily Mail publishes a picture, gets a slapped wrist by the PCC, then takes it down and issues a rather poor apology.
6: The Lesson: All of the world’s problems can be solved with free wrinkle cream and a dvd.
This is the oddest thing I find with The Daily Mail, they report that an army of immigrants is marching on your home as you read this, wielding knives that give you cancer when they are so much as pointed at you. There is very little to feel even vaguely positive about.
Except there is. It transpires that amid the chaos The Daily Mail is a shining beacon of hope guiding us through the turbulent maelstrom in which we exist with free wrinkle cream. And the occasional UB40 cd!
So when that recently released ex-con asylum seeker, currently living on benefits paid for by your taxes, breaks down your door, stabs you, then steals your cd player, at least the last thing you will hear will be the mellow tones of “Red Red Wine” disappearing out of your door. Also, your corpse will be wrinkle-free.
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