Due to the drought of people slagging off the Daily Mail at the moment I thought now was the perfect time to bring it back to the public's attention with my own ill-informed views.
I have a strange relationship with the Daily Mail, a split opinion if you will.
One overwhelming thing comes to mind whenever the mail decides to invade my life, whether it's by being for sale outside a newsagent as I strut by, or during a discussion about the recent right-wing hysteria sweeping the country like 'The Infected' in 28 Days Later. It's a feeling of familiarity and comfort.
My late Grandparents, staggeringly wonderful people both, read the Daily Mail. Oddly I never heard them say a single a single reactionary or particularly right-wing sentence. They weren't what I suspect most people imagine when they picture a Daily Mail reader in their mind. No flying spittle or hatred of immigrants. They had close friends of various nationalities (yes, I know, "one of my best friends is black") and were simply decent people. I can't hold their choice of paper against them.
So naturally, being brought up by my Grandparents for some years, I used to read the Mail in my early teens. Although at the time I could name every member of the cabinet at the time and their roles, a task I would fail at after listing just three today, my understanding of scare-mongering and propaganda was not quite acute enough to Read Between The Lies. I read every story as if it was gospel. I knew I didn't like the redtops, I was already too pretentious to be seen reading one, and I was simply too thick to read a broadsheet. So I decided that I would go with the broadloid option.
Eventually, I started to become interested in how politics affected me. When I was 16 I joined a march against the Criminal Justice Bill. This was exciting, there were fit indie girls, punks who looked really cool (see my previous Camden piece), a huge mix of people from all walks of life.
So I knew little to no detail of the bill I was marching against and shouting about, I just knew it was going to make it more difficult for me to experience things I wanted to do in the rest of my life. This was exciting. There was that kind of atmosphere you can only get when thousands of people are all crammed together with a like mind, wanting the same thing.
The whole day was like one big celebration. The police were friendly; laughing and joking with the crowds, they didn't behave like we were doing anything wrong. Incidentally, we were hiding from any scuffers in view anyway since my companion, (lets call him...Alan) had been forbidden to come to the march by his Metropolitan Police Officer father who was on duty that day. This was a man who once gave us a lift home after a Manics show, pulling up right outside Brixton Academy in a fucking police Land Rover. We looked so cool climbing into that.
On reaching the final stopping point of the march, we left for the train back to our thalidomide satellite town. When I got back home and switched on the news, the peaceful celebration had become a full-on riot.
The next day I read the first six pages of the Daily Mail. Six pages of vertigo inducing bias.
Apparently, tensions had been running high all day, relations between protesters and police had been strained. This led to a brutal attack on the police that was explained in awe-inspiring detail by the Mail. After five pages of evil injuries sustained by police officers from the unruly mob, a single paragraph mentioned a large number of protesters were hurt.
That was it. One paragraph in six pages recounting events I didn't recognise even though many had been experienced only 24 hours before.
I saw the Daily Mail's editorial policy clearly for the first time. I could never read it again.
That was half my life ago, and now, just like everyone else, my other overriding emotion is that I blame it for pretty much every right-wing opinion that anyone the country may have. It is a massive veiny cock with a set of sweaty bollocks swinging underneath like a pendulum of doom with Diana's face tattood on it. Penetrating every terrified cunt in the land and filling them with anti-immigration semen, and every single sperm cell has a little Hitler 'tache.
The Mail's winding up of the country regarding, Jonathon Ross, Russell Brand, Frankie Boyle and Jeremy Clarkson, plus any other part of the BBC they can latch on to has been like a vice grip of outrage.
A few weeks ago they posted this article on the web, please read it:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081949/The-BBC-fills-living-rooms-smutty-degrading-obscenities.html
I'm aware that looking this story up just to get my blood boiling makes me just as bad as the Mail readers that called to complain to the BBC about these scandals without having heard the offending material but...I don't care. This is my blog, I'll be as hypocritical as I want.
Notice the article has received no comments. This isn't true, because I left them a comment.
I pointed out that I would rather be 'raped by a dog than read the Mail'. They may have thought I was merely being crude, but I am deadly serious, my motto is 'try anything once'. I've read the Mail, that didn't work out for me, the dog could turn out to be a tender lover. And if not, I'm not adverse to a bit of rough sex. Being bummed must be great fun, the gayers love it.
I suspect that every comment they received was against their argument, so nothing ever got noted.
Surely not?
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