Guest Blog: It’s not unusual.
Posted by Merk
October 19th, 2009
The following post was orignially posted at Deeplyflawedbuttrying’s Blog and reproduced here with kind permission.
Jan Moir? Is this article really that bad?
So I read the article by Jan Moir, about the death of Stephen Gately. The thing I dont understand, is the absolute shock it appears to have caused.
Daily Mail publishes hateful, homophobic shit, callously exploiting the death of one person, to strengthen its hate towards a section of the public it despises? Its a bit like the Kate Moss ‘Supermodel does cocaine shocker’. Do the people who are shocked not read the Daily Mail?
When Rachel Ward died, Amanda Platell published one her hateful pieces. She outright stated that complete responsibility for the girls death, was with Ms.Wards friends. Before Miss Ward was buried, she outright accused Haydn Johnson, a friend of Miss Wards, of causing her death by ignoring an answering machine message(that apparently only existed in Ms.Platell’s head), pleaing for help. The only mitigation for Mr.Johnson, in her article, was the insinuation that Ms’Ward had caused her own death by engaging in immoral behaviour(well she had been drinking!). She attempted to be sympathetic to the girls grieving parents, by telling them not only was she empathetic to the plight of losing their daughter, but to their plight of losing their daughter after she dissapointed their middle class, moral upbringing, by abandoning any moral framework they had instilled, by becoming everything that was wrong with modern women. Which she helpfully illustrated with pictures of Ms.Ward, having fun, while she was alive. The story was removed from the site, after the father of her grieving friend, made a complaint to the PCC. Which did not result in apology from the Mail, but did result in removal of said article.
A Daily Mail columnist is salivating over someones death, willing to lie about them, to illustrate the breakdown of society -done before. Must be something else causing the shock? The homophobia in the article?
I instruct you to go to the Daily Mail website, read as they fight the corner of everyone who has ever been chastised for trying to mainating a status quo, where gay means ‘unnatural’. Go read Melanie Phillips tell you that gay rights, undermines marriage as an institution. Or Amanda Platell dismiss anyone who objects to not being able to pursue their life, without their sexuality used as a reason to exclude them from society, as a ‘gay zealot’. Read as they champion the people who refuse to bow down to hard won legislation, to prevent sexuality automatically meaning a presumption of immorality.
Maybe people rarely notice venom that isnt spouted at them? Are there any other groups who the Daily Mail hates? Lets look outside Jan Moirs current article- we have this recent wet dream of a Daily Mail headline. Narcissistic I may be, and therefore sensitive to the Daily Mails take on single parents. But seriously, there is no shortage of material.
Although, I was one of the Mails target ‘most wanted’ before my marriage ended, as a working mother. Helpfully told by ‘Femail’ that me choosing to work, was going to damage my child, and was ultimately responsible for the fracturing of our society into immoral little pieces. Oh wait, even before motherhood- the Mail didnt much like me. Type Rape, into the search engine of the Daily Mail, and read how they have interpreted the painfully inadequate framework of rape legislation, which has produced a 5% successful prosecution rate for rape. Lists of vitriolic stories, of girls who ‘cry rape’, and the heartbreaking consequences of women reporting such a piffling little thing.
Thank fuck am not black. The biggest bane of the Daily Mails existence is the fact that the BNP are so despised that they cant come outright and say they support them. Instead they have to treat ‘foul’ as a contested term, by placing it in inverted commas, while juxtaposing it against the revelation that the BNP have opened their membership to ‘non white members’.
With editorial about how the indigenous british people(read white, for indigenous) are constantly under threat, not just from the constant threat of immigration, but by being persecuted and not represented by british institutions. The very presence of people in the world who may have a different religion is alarming. The only time the Daily Mail champions the right of any woman, is to show how terrible those muslim types are- look at how they treat women who have children? Further evidence of this threat is shown, when we see how unfairly people who only want the right to be racist, are being treated.
So who is safe from the Daily Fail? Children? Well, children are safe if they are nice middle class children. But even then the Daily Mail isnt above causing them pain, and humiliation, in the course of a good story, as long as they can attack one of their other despised groups of people, in the process. Here is the transcript of an article the paper had to take down, where they stood a page size picture of a named eleven year old girl, alongside a feature about how her mother didnt love her. The feature was designed to illicit public reaction against her ‘unnatural mother’- the fact that an 11 year old girl was deeply humiliated, surely ok, because the end justifies the means? Feral children anyone, or maybe you just want to starve and hiss at the mothers? The Fail doesnt mind condemning children, if they are outside the nice white, heterosexual, christian, middle class dystopia they would like us to believe once existed, and will again.
Cries of ‘complain to the PCC’ have abounded, since the publication of Moirs article. Again, while admirable, am not entirely sure what people believe this will do. Have been complaining to the PCC for years about the homophobic, racist, hate mongering shit, this vile rag publishes- and it achieves nothing.
This may be the cry of a jaded left wing ranter, with an over developed sense of justice, and handwringing tendencies. But it is true, complaining to the PCC achieves nothing. The media is powerful, we know that the the editorial content of your average newspaper, affects more than the people involved in the article.-But unless its exceptional circumstances, your complaint about an article, not directly about you, will be binned. THe Chair of the PCC is Paul Dacre, for gods sake. Paul Dacre being the editor of er…The Daily Mail.
I would like to end this post, with a sense of ‘we must do something about this’- I certainly would prefer my journalists held accountable for constistently spreading vile homophobic, racist, mysogynistic shit- but there are few avenues to go down. We could do as this facebook group suggests and go straight to the advertising revenue that allows this shitrag to be published. Indeed, Marks and Spencer have withdrawn advertising on the grounds of the Moir article. But seriously, take action yourself. Stop buying this shit. Dont accept the flawed, bigoted premises, that underpin their editorial.
And for fucks sake, stop kidding yourself that this Jan Moir article is some kind of abhorration, in an otherwise lovely newspaper. Yes, the Jan Moir article really was that bad. In the context of the normal editorial line of the Daily Mail, it really wasnt that unusual.
Categories: Guest Blog, Media, Sex & Sexuality |
Nice article BTW
The mail is trying to recover lost ground though:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1221296/JANET-STREET-PORTER-Being-gay-killed-man-week–wasnt-Stephen-Gately.html
Couldn’t agree more.
Does anyone who was appalled by this article really think the Mail is otherwise lovely? I think we all know how bigoted it typically is, it’s just that this particular story struck a chord.
It often just comes down to being the right place at the right time that the reaction is as big as it is, but it’s an opportunity to put all their vile campaigns under the spotlight.
Can you change “dissapointed” to the correct spelling? Despite the excellence of the article, it doesn’t do you any favours. Would you ever go to an “apointment”?
Just because something isn’t out of the ordinary doesn’t make it right. And if we’re going to make buying the Mail socially unacceptable then we have to start somewhere.
I wouldn’t be downbeat about the whole PCC thing either. It appears that the PCC are going to view the 20,000-odd complains as an ‘exceptional circumstance’. And even if they don’t do anything then it could still provoke a debate about the future of the PCC.
I truly hope so. I think ultimately the real problem is, and always will be, that enough people actually hold these views, and while I truly believe that they will fade in time- in meantime- certain aspects of media will reflect/feed them.
Steve, I cant change post- its on someone elses blog. I will change it on my own blog. My blog posts are generally written very quickly, while blood boiling…so spelling mistakes, typos, sentences that dont make sense…v common.
Point of order here – Paul Dacre is NOT chair of the PCC, it is Baronees Buscome http://www.pcc.org.uk/about/whoswho/members.html.
Paul Dacre is head of the Code Committee of the PCC, the people who decide the rules that the PCC apply
http://www.pcc.org.uk/about/whoswho/committee.html
Otherwise, an interesting and justified rant. Although I am glad to see that the Daily Mail is being subject to the sort of witch hunt that it orchestrated on Ross and Brand. I hope that this is a wake-up call, in that the Daily Mail has set itself up as the voice of Britain, and has just realised that it has missed the mark completely, and hopefully a lot of readers too. They may now realise that most of its readers buy it because it is a mid-market paper (the £4.99 bottle of wine of the newspaper world), not because they share the “going to the dogs” “Previously Great Britain” and “Loosing our identity” attitude of the rabid few.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword” was the expression running through my head last night as I listened to the news.
P.S. Why nothing in my copy of Metro this morning?
No, we don’t think this is unusual, it’s just a particularly visible example of the kind of hate this mis-named newspaper peddles on a regular basis. At the moment, I’m going for anything that will give me the leverage to show my parents why they should stop buying it. It is in fact this very kind of regularly peddled nonsense that they read that makes me wary of telling them that I’m gay.
Also, we need an independent press regulator. Having the chairman be the editor of one of the worst offenders is simply wrong – but you knew that.
Maybe it’s just me but I can’t see what the problem is here. On his last night on planet earth Stephen Gately went out to a bar with his partner and picked up a guy who they took back to their apartment. If a heterosexual married couple did the same wouldn’t that be a bit sleazy too?? So how come we can reasonably call one sleazy but not the other? I thought we lived in a society where we treated all people equally but obviously not.
Sluglet: The point is that whether or not they picked up a guy at a bar or just invited him back for a bit of Rock Band it had nothing to do with the death.
If it were a heterosexual couple I doubt you, they, or anyone would really think that the whether or nots would be suitable for a news story, especially one when the body is barely cold and the coroner had given a verdict. Cause of death: ‘natural causes’, but obviously this is impossible because the guy was gay and they are inherently dishonest to the point of being able to bribe a coroner from the grave.
If SG were hetero do you really think Moir would have sharpened her pen so thoroughly? I don’t see homophobia everywhere, but that article was dripping in a hectic amount of the stuff. It’s a bugger to get out of cashmere, I know that much.
And ’sleazy’ – please. Even if they did bone the dude up, on, round, and through every orifice and perform a three-way cum swap I don’t see this as anything noteworthy, but then again I’d happily sit down with my Mail-reading mum and watch The Ice Storm, where heterosexual and middle class swinging just plays in the background. Indeed, I’m sure The Mail has given away The Ice Storm as a freebie. And if not, I’m just going to pretend that they did and write about it anyway because there’s no smoke without fire.
Bravo, excellent article. The linked Mail article about single mothers is unbelievable in its hypebole
Agree fully. The articles that annoy me are when they find 1 benefit cheat. And try to convince us that it’s an example of a dishonest, scrounger society.
You know, I’ll do the math.
There are 6 million people on benefits. This is one person.
In order to demonsrate that even 1% of these people are cheating, they’d have to find 6′000 of these cases!?
Want to know what the total stands at so far – Daily Mail exposes on cheats. 184
Well done Daily Mail for succesfully managing to find 0.0026% of the people cheating on benefits, in almost 26 years of looking
The problem is so rife, it’s alarming
Christo, 1% of 6 milion is 60,000 not 6,000.
184 / 60,000 = 0.3%
In relation to the blog post, I agree completely. The Mail prints this stuff day in, day out, every day for years and years. The difference is they phrase it to suggest conclusions to the reader. Moir’s approach was to skip suggestion and get straight to the point.
The Mail has been an absolute national disgrace for years, and do far far more damage to society than the government could ever hope to do.
And yet while people whine that the government steals all our taxes and ruin the country, they happily hand over near 300 quid a year to pay for the Mail to do the same. The mind boggles.
You forgot fat people, who according to a good proportion of the comments on yesterday’s article about a 30st woman who was subjected to a fat-phobic beating on a train, deserve everything they get, since their condition is apparently their own fault. Apparently covering a 50 year-old mum in bruises to the point she nearly lost her eye ’serves as an incentive to people to not be fat’. Day in, day out there are always at least two or three weight-related stories on the website, and always of a mean-spirited nature. ‘Fat people to bankrupt NHS’. ‘Clothes prices rise as Tesco stocks size 30 schoolwear’. One of the most sensible comments on yesterday’s story was basically along the lines of ‘if people are exposed to daily articles that relentlessly bash an entire group of people, is it any surprise that certain individuals then think it’s OK to go and do some literal ‘bashing’ of those they’re been indoctrinated to hate?
Good article. In the circumstances I just wish I could stop mis-reading the blog owner’s title as “Deeply flawed buttyring” every time I have a gander at mailwatch.
I did indeed forget about fat people. Could have gone on longer about women. Essentially, any group outside middle income, white, christian, nuclear families headed by men, are only group who Fail are nice about. Not to mention cancer…my god, how scared are they of cancer at the Fail?
Sorry that came out wrong. Is late.
At last…someone (James Russell) who understands that most of those who buy the DM do so because it’s a not-too-pricey, non-broadsheet but not too tabloidy paper which covers a lot of different type of stories. The main obsession of the DM is with health issues, an obsession shared by most of the population. And another selling point of the DM is that unlike, say, the Guardian or the Observer, it doesn’t think that politics is everything; it covers a wide range of stories. Most of the contributors to this site only want to see political/ideological issues dealt with in the papers you read, which makes you unrepresentative, you would all no doubt say ’superior’, to most other people. And anyway, the DM isn’t nearly as racist as you say it is. Most of my comments to the Mail Online on race-related issues don’t get through (so much for Jamie Sport’s article saying that the DM was no longer moderating its online comments!). Nor is the DM as Islamophobic as you claim. The comment that I posted on the recent DE front page re: sharia law would almost certainly never have got printed on the DM online pages. PS if it makes you feel better I did think that the Jan Moir article was nasty. Even I draw the line at spitting on the graves of the recently departed.
Neander. I know many people who buy the Mail for exactly the reasons you state. That does not mean that the editorial line of the Mail is not demonstrably racist, homophobic, mysogynistic-bordering(and quite often crossing that ‘border’) incites hatred. The Mail is every bit as racist as I, and everyone else says it is. It demonises people from all minority groups, it misrepresents statistics, research, and very frequently outright lies- in order to push its agenda.
Neander: so if what you say is true, then it’d be excellent if they stopped publishing a load of demonstrably false shite with regard to racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, health scare rubbish and all that. Because if the majority of people who buy the DM aren’t buying the paper for that anyway, they may as well get some balanced, accurate reporting as opposed to a load of hysterical bullshit and scare stories, no?
No one is demanding all papers be like the broadsheets. I think most contributors to this site actually just don’t want to see horrible fearmongering stories, lies and flat-out abuse in a rag that passes itself off as some sort of national moral compass. There’s nothing “superior” about that – what sort of moron deliberately wants to be fed inaccurate cobblers passed off as news all the time, and also wants that for his fellow chap in the street? In fact if anyone has chips on their shoulder, it’s the sort of hardcore mailite who will only ever believe stories that fit their prejudices – and they like the Mail because it spoon-feeds them bollocks about “mythical” climate change, ‘elf n safety, women failing when having a family and career, the whole nation being invaded by muslims and so on so they never have to consider they may be wrong or have their world view challenged.
But then again, apparently they’re only a tiny minority and most people buy the mail for Fred Basset and the crossword, so fuck em, eh?
I think a great many people came to see this case precisely because it was picked up in other sections of the media, I do not and would not read the Wail unless I particularly needed the ill-informed objectionable diatribe from the right point of view however I came across the Moir article as a result of Charlie Brooker’s rebuttal in The Grauniad.
I have even seen people threatening to boycott the Mail as if any sensible person hadn’t been doing that for years. However the fact is that a great many people read the Mail, the Express and The Sun where they are clearly told what is going on and what they ought to think about it. The Mail may not itself claim to be overtly political but its politics are very clear to see. The reason it tries to stay away from mentioning the ‘P’ word is that a large section of the population think they are not interested in politics, question them on actual issues of course and it is quite different. I would refute anyone who attempted to claim the Mail has a wide variety of opinions it merely has a wide variety of correspondents peddling the same opinions. If you compare some of the populist press in this country from the 1920s 1930s that were more openly neo-fascist you find that the opinions and the emotive language and demonising used are very much the same.
What the Moir case has highlighted is that the PCC has a clear conflict of interest due to Dacre’s involvement. It also brought to light just how much of a paper tiger the PCC is and how really it wanted the whole matter to just blow over. Whilst I may wonder where the hell those 21,000 are the rest of the time I am glad they all stood up and shouted about something, I just hope they all remember it the next time the Mail crosses the line. Which should be in about a week.
Hold on Neander – stop using me as support.
Whilst it is the market position that makes the Mail so popular, readers are fed lies and gross distortions, and no matter how discerning and intelligent they are, some of the views and articles must be polluting their minds. And in worst cases, they believe the rubbish spouted wholesale. Please don’t treat your readers as fools Mr Dacre – they are better than that.
I don’t hate Mail readers, I just want them to realise how much they are being lied to.
Now where did I see that recently?
We are a twitter page dedicated to exposing the alleged hate-filled bigotry, homophobia, mysogyny and far right-wing manipulations of the UK’s Daily Mail. We will put links to your blog up regularly. Join us!
I totally agree. There have been plenty of articles in the Mail that are just as bad. But that didn’t stop me spitting out my coffee in outrage when I read it.
Quite so.
It’s totally true and accurate to point out that this story was nothing unusual in the hate and ignorance – not to mention outright fabrication – that the DM employs on a regular basis.
I think the reason why it struck such a chord was the poor guy wasn’t even laid to rest & in the ground before they started their sh!te.
They can whine about ‘coordinated campaigns’ as much as they like (with not a scrap of credible evidence) but this really got people making their views plain as a record number of PCC complaints prove (more than they have had in all of their previous time operating!
Isn’t it interesting how this supposed ‘coordinated campaign’ was so much more supported & successful compared to the usual fabricated ‘national storm’ b*llocks they are always trying to whip up & gurning about?
They actively attempt (practically on a daily basis) to create ’storms’ of protest and clearly despite many years of their lying propaganda they just aren’t getting through.
Which is nice.
Is the ability to rate comments on the Daily Mail website a complete fraud?
Try voting on a comment; clear your cookies, and refresh the page. Your vote will have disappeared.
All I can assume from this is that, the DM decide on their position and then set the ratings for each comment depending on the length of time since it was posted and how well it reflects DM opinion.
“All I can assume from this is that, the DM decide on their position and then set the ratings for each comment depending on the length of time since it was posted and how well it reflects DM opinion.”
Alan, the whole comments page is a fraud. This is how it works:
The Mail is only allowed to legally go so far. So they hint at something, let the public say what they want to say, and leave it up there for everyone to see – hilighted by ratings.
However, it is fraudlent:
For many years they moderated anything left out/
The ratings system. If the comments aren’t following their policy, and people are going against the mail, they quite simply delete all of the comments and start a fresh.
Online votes. If the votes don’t follow their policy, they delete them as well