The Mail

...been happening to me over the past couple of weeks. My voyeurism receptors have been going haywire and I can’t for the life of me comprehend why. Maybe there’s something in the air; the pleasant autumnal ambience calling for a starkly contrasting texture, a balancing of Yin and Yang. Maybe I’ve got some unidentifiable illness which has rewired my brain to seek out inherently nasty things. Maybe I’m just a sad pillock with nothing better to do. Whatever; ...
...am talking, of course, about the Daily Mail’s website.


Before I begin this review in earnest, I feel I should address some of my own issues. Think of yourself, dear reader, as my unpaid psychoanalyst. I guess my problem is that I hate the Daily Mail for its hatred of – well – everything, but as anyone who has read any of my rants will realise, I hate a lot of things too. This makes me a terrible hypocrite and leads me to a guilt ... more

Weird things have been happening to me over the past couple of weeks. My voyeurism receptors have been going haywire and I can’t for the life of me comprehend why. Maybe there’s something in the air; the pleasant autumnal ambience calling for a starkly contrasting texture, a balancing of Yin and Yang. Maybe I’ve got some unidentifiable illness which has rewired my brain to seek out inherently nasty things. Maybe I’m just a sad pillock with nothing better to do. Whatever; why would you care? The point is that my renewed voyeuristic zeal has steered me towards that noble bastion of everything rotten and rubbish in Middle England. I am talking, of course, about the Daily Mail’s website.

Before I begin this review in earnest, I feel I should address some of my own issues. Think of yourself, dear reader, as my unpaid psychoanalyst. I guess my problem is that I hate the Daily Mail for its hatred of – well – everything, but as anyone who has read any of my rants will realise, I hate a lot of things too. This makes me a terrible hypocrite and leads me to a guilt complex and lots of contradictory, neurotic impulses. Furthermore, I could describe my rants as those of a thinking Richard Littlejohn, but this is so utterly paradoxical it makes my head hurt whenever I consider it; I then need to pop a couple of Asprin and take a good lie down in a dark room until the thought passes. As you can imagine, this can actually be quite debilitating for me. So I got to thinking: maybe I should be more positive, find some more pleasant ways to express myself. My Mother repeatedly hammered home a piece of advice to me when I was little: “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” If you have read some of my more distasteful reviews, you will realise just how hard this innocent saying is for me to adhere to. Yet if I can say something nice about the Daily Mail, then by Jupiter, I can do it for anything! I reckon if I can pull this off, I would spontaneously transform into a glowing, transcendent embodiment of all the hippy ideals of old; imbuing everyone I pass with love and respect for their fellow human beings. So here goes; something positive about the Daily Mail...

Ummmmm............

Hmmmmmmm.........

Well, maybe...................

Er.......................

Ok, got something. It’s not much, but I DO like the ease with which the Mail’s name can be parodied. Here is a selection of my favourites:

The Hate Mail

The Daily Bile

The Daily Heil

And my personal favourite, which I will be using for the remainder of the review as I feel it encapsulates the essence of the Mail best: The Daily Fail. If you can think of any more, do let me know. Answers on a postcard. If they are funny enough, I will stick them in the review post-hoc.

Now, on with the bad stuff. Just like the paper rag which is bought every day by two million frothing, sanctimonious twerps, the Daily Fail’s website is rotten to the core. A parochial, patriarchal, patriotic, puritanical, patronising, putrid, prurient, prudish, insult to proper journalists everywhere, there really is nothing of value to be found on this depressing website. For a start, there are spelling and grammar errors in many articles. Coming over here, spilling hatred into the minds of the public, they should at least learn to speak our language proper, yeah? But of course, there are other criteria than syntax by which a paper can be judged. So does the Fail contain everything a good, frothing, right-wing comic should?

Xenophobia: check. If I had a pound for every day that goes by without a vehement anti-immigrant / asylum seeker / Muslim story being published, I would be exactly as skint as I am now. Last year, the following extraordinary e-mail was sent out by the Fail’s Diana Appleyard:

“I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana”.

Congrats, Diana, for so jovially sticking two fingers up at the ideal of impartial journalism. This e-mail shows the depths the Fail are prepared to plumb in order to push their anti-immigrant agenda. I wonder whether, if someone had a positive story about employing Eastern European staff, they would have appeared in Diana’s article; I’ll leave you to ponder this yourself. The £100 bribe hammers the final nail into the ethical coffin.

Casual misogyny: Check. We are told on an almost daily basis how bad it is for women to have careers and isn’t it sad they won’t be chained to the stove, starched pinafore-clad, waiting for little Bryony and Hector to return home from the local Grammar. One of the Fail’s favourite tin-foil-hat topics is that of feminism, which they often seek to undermine by spelling ‘women’s rights’ ‘wimmins rights’, as though phonetic spelling somehow invalidates the premise that men and women should enjoy equal standing in society. Well I can do that too, yoo teedeeuss biggerts, and it doesn’t improve my argument in any way. Pah. Feminism is also often decried by Amanda Platell; a woman who clearly doesn’t realise that she wouldn’t have her cushy job were it not for the work of feminists past. Which all rather begs the question: why let Amanda do it when you could get A-man-da do it? Seriously, Amanda, I’ll take your job. The fact I have half a chromosome less than you practically guarantees I’ll do it better. Cuh, women.

Misattributed paranoia: check. If all the Fail’s apocalyptic predictions had come true in the past year, I would have died 50 times over. First prize goes to Richard Littlejohn, arguably the toughest stalwart of Middle-England paranoia. He has casually lied about EU regulations, a fact uncovered hilariously by Stephen Fry in his brilliant quiz show, QI. Recently, Littlejohn also published an article in which he claimed councils were planning a £1000 fine for putting potato peelings in the wrong bin; a claim so obviously fake it would not look out of place if it was on sale in a faux designer shop on a Greek island. When not spreading paranoia to the semi-educated masses, Littlejohn spends his time arguing for the interests of the rich, for example in his recent suggestion that the proposed 50% tax on the top earners was poor policy because sales of caviar and Ferraris would plummet and the rich work really hard for their unreasonable wealth and blah, blah, blah, and boo-hoo-hoo. Instead, he suggested the UK’s gaping financial hole should be paid for by upping VAT, placing the onus on everyone’s shoulders, irrespective of whether they can afford price rises. Littlejohn has released some of his columns as a book, “Littlejohn’s Britain”. Imagine such a place, dear reader, and recoil in horror: a return to the ‘good old days’ where the wholesale abolishment of “elf & safety” (what the hell is it with phonetic spelling?!?) means that children get to chop their fingers off whilst working in factories for £2 a day and builders dangle precariously, 2000 ft in the air without so much as a climbing harness. A nightmarish, postmodernist Dickensian dystopia in which the rich drive around in Range Rovers modified to run on the tears of the poor. Brrrrrr.

Rabid, mindless flag waving: check. Arguably, the Fail are pipped to the post on this by their identical and no less evil twin, the Daily Express, with their gushing, bucket-fetching Princess Di-based sycophancy. Nevertheless, the Fail frequently publish articles in which they whinge about the St. George’s Cross being banned “in various parts of the country” (Fail, 31 May, 2006) and constantly tell us how Christmas has been banished and must now be called Multi-Ethic Winter Festivities because of the PC brig... yada yada. Clearly, the Fail have been living in a different country to me; Christmas saturates every aspect of our lives from October onwards and I have to put up with tedious patriotism from bellowing fools practically every day, especially when a national sport team is up to something of minor importance. Bah humbug, I say. Anyhoo, that’s all the essential boxes ticked. These themes run rampant throughout like a form of social gangrene. My diagnosis? Amputation needed immediately. Little toe of Britain poisoned. Social bacteria quickly spreading into foot. Seek evasive action.

Looking through the pages of the Fail’s website, I realised my sense of hope, joy and compassion was gradually draining from me. In fact, that’s the understatement of the year. It was violently spewing forth from every orifice, even opening up some new ones in the process. I also realised I was becoming angry against my better judgment. Reading the Fail is like staring into the abyss: a swirling vortex of infinite misery and hatred. All this got me to pondering a few intriguing questions: why would anyone willingly subject themselves to this twaddle? Was J.K. Rowling reading the Fail when she conceived the ghastly dementors (Harry Potter saddos like me will know what I’m talking about)? Where does free speech end and diet BNP propaganda begin? And so on. I don’t intend to answer the latter two questions, but I was intrigued by the quintessential Fail reader. I reasoned that they must be:

a. Clinically insane,
b. Woefully naive, or
c. Just plain bad.

So what else would a sad, lonely individual like me do? I had to test my hypothesis. The Fail provided a convenient means for me to carry out a little experiment. It lets readers comment on articles; a kind of Facebook for Fascists, if you will. Comments can be rated positively or negatively by readers, via use of little green upwards-pointing and red downwards-pointing arrows respectively. Personally, I would have preferred it had they put up a picture of a burkha and the St. George’s Cross for negative and positive ratings. Never mind. I guess I can’t have it all. Another example of political correctness gone mad. In any case, I decided that if my reasoning was on track, then sensible, non-patriotic or generally pleasant comments would elicit negative ratings; whilst barmy right-wing clichés, ‘Jonny Foreigner’ rhetoric or subtle misogyny and homophobia would elicit positive ratings. In the interests of empirical rigour, I also set up a control condition, in which I posted inane, politically innocuous or downright irrelevant witterings, in order to get a feel for the baseline negative / positive inclinations of Fail readers. These ranged from the sublime (Saccharine snails feast upon the cabbage of life’s palpitations) to the ridiculous (I like chicken, I like liver; meow mix, meow mix, please deliver). Overall, I received an average rating of -4 for my neutral comments, which I then used as a baseline score for my analysis.

In terms of my main sample, I randomly selected recent articles and read through the comments. I judged comments to be ‘good’ if they:

a. Showed compassion for an individual in an article.
b. Questioned any taken-for-granted knowledge with sound evidence.
c. Made a point via a process of inductive, logical, or hypothetico-deductive reasoning.

This category included comments such as: “You people are so quick to jump about and down for your witch hunts. This woman was clearly ill - as mentioned above, the condition is called Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. She needs help, not prison.” (readers scored: -20); along with such glimmers of hope as this: “Eddie: "Can someone please explain to me why we are protecting scum like this by not naming and shaming them and why their face is blurred."
Eddie, I can only assume it is to protect the identity of the child and that there may be a legal obligation to do so on his behalf.” (readers scored: +27: I know! I was chuffed to bits!)

By contrast, I judged comments to be ‘poor’ if they

a. Simply repeated what was already in the article. Polly want a cracker?
b. Involved vitriol which would make even yours truly blush.
c. Were based on idle speculation and / or irrational fear.

This category included such semi-coherent gems as: “Force poeple to go to work, or soon you will have mothers who intentionally take drugs during pregnancies, so they can have benifit on their disabled children...” (readers scored: +2); and the simple, concise “EVIL” from Debs, Weston Super Mare, who clearly needs to find her caps lock key (readers scored: +42). Overall, I took a sample of 30 good and 30 poor comments and averaged the score for each category. Poor comments received an average rating of 105.6, while good comments averaged -3.5. Accounting for the baseline negativity (-4) of the average fail reader, this gives us respective scores of -7.5 and 101.6, showing that poorly constructed comments are generally judged to be good, while well thought out comments are generally judged to be bad. From this, we can conclude that the quintessential Fail reader is indeed crazy, naive or bad, although I yearn for evidence to the contrary. Daily Mail land is a perplexing, upside-down world in which to dwell. I for one will never go back there. I simply value the remains of my sanity too much. 

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