A newspaper full of hate and bile

Well hello again readers of this blog. I trust you have all had a good weekend and that the pre-Christmas panic stations have not set in just yet. I can honestly say that I have not done anything remotely Christmassy yet, not bought any presents, not written any cards, zippo. But more of that another time.

For those people reading this blog and as people who know me will testify, I am not someone who has a lot of pet hates. Nothing really riles me that much and I am generally quite a laid back, tolerant person. However, there are some selected items and people that are certainly on my list in the unlikely event of me ever being invited onto Room 101 to banish my pet hates. Instruction manuals with diagrams that are impossible to understand and which seem to have instructions in every language except English are a shoe-in for the shortlist.

Also a certainty for the list are adverts for "no win no fee" lawyers, Injury Lawyers For You, that sort of thing. You want to know why the world is getting more politically correct? Well, it's because firms are scared of compensation claims in the claims culture that is so actively promoted by these legal firms who seem to take up such a vast percentage of TV adverts during the daytime. People that use text or MSN Messenger speak in everyday conversation also have to be banished to oblivion, there simply cannot be any justification for a person verbally saying "LOL" or "LMAO" when conversing on the bus, train or in the office. I also have a personal dislike of Sellotape given that in my experience I seem to often waste at least a quarter of the reel through the product sticking to itself.

And then of course there are the people that make even the most mild mannered, laid back person seethe with anger the moment they appear on television. Fortunately Jim Davidson doesn't appear on TV very often these days so we can put a line through him. However, the hideous cretin Paul Daniels still seems to appear on some adverts and so he needs to be here (incidentally the aforementioned Davidson did actually banish Daniels to Room 101 when he appeared on the show, so he has made himself useful once). And then there are the parasites who always seem to appear on TV at the first sign of somebody else's misfortune. I am particularly thinking here of Max Clifford and Piers Morgan.

Morgan leads us however to the institution in British life which I reserve a particular level of dislike to above any other. Ironic really, given that this institution has done more to promote hate and marginalisation of anybody and anything that does not fit into Middle England's ideal world. Yes folks, sitting at number 1 on my absolute list of things that must go into Room 101 is Britain's most hate and bile filled newspaper which only reserves good words for itself. I am of course referring to the Daily Mail.

So what do I particularly have against the Mail? Hell, where do I start? I think that it is the most propaganda filled newspaper in the country, which is always full of negative headlines. If it isn't railing against asylum seekers, it is railing against those that take advantage of the benefit system. If it rails against neither of those groups, it rails against political correctness or against big brother watching us. And when it doesn't do that, it tries to get people sacked without reporting the full facts and generally bitches about celebrities looking too thin, too fat, or having a bad hair day in the way that a group of giggly college girls would in the student common room. Or, it criticises newsreaders for wearing short skirts on the news.

Now, I am not saying that some of these topics are not worthy of being tackled critically. My problem is that the Mail never provides a balanced argument on anything and in fact only serves to scare monger and blow things out of proportion. Clearly there is a problem with asylum in this country but it is not as cut and dried as the Mail reports it. Some of the sensationalist headlines and reporting it provides on the subject pigeonhole every asylum seeker as being akin to something we would scrape off of our shoes, when really there are some people who have genuine, harrowing reasons to seek asylum here. It is also worth noting that a good number of people from overseas who take residence here add tremendous value to the labour market by taking on jobs, particularly within unskilled sectors that a good many British nationals do not have the inclination to do. My point is that the Mail's sensationalist approach tars everybody with the same brush and so its less informed readers will in turn tar everybody with the same brush, resulting in unsavoury scenes where groups of Little Englanders assemble outside asylum seeker detention centres to protest about them being in their backyard, as though they are among the same level of pondlife as paedophiles and rapists. Clearly this is a bad misrepresentation for those who are just being detained while their residency is being validated.

Equally, the benefits system is clearly there to serve an important purpose for those who are genuinely incapacitated through ill health or because they are caring for someone else who is ill. Obviously the problem is that wherever you have a system designed to be fair, there will be those who will take advantage for their own means and who often regard their benefits as paying better than actually working for a living. Those that cheat the system clearly need to be dealt with, but that does not make the principle of a benefits or welfare system wrong. What is required is an evaluation of the benefits system and a clear strategy around tackling those who abuse it with iron rather than kid gloves.

The Mail seems to have quite a scattergun, draconian approach to tackling its recurring series of hot potatoes. It offers up a regular dosage of scare mongering but does not seem to offer anything by way of insightful, solution based commentary. Rather than be insightful, the Mail's editorial and lead commentators tend to deal more in the inciteful. Very rarely does the paper have anything positive to say and just seems to deal in a constant stream of moral outrage, the sort of which seemed to be confined to Points Of View with letters from the likes of "Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells".

At the heart of things though, the Daily Mail holds itself up as a newspaper that opposes a nanny state, does not like any form interference in our lives and likes people to have a freedom of choice. Not bad principles at all if you stick to them. However, the Mail conveniently forgot these principles when it came to seizing the opportunity to find an Everest sized story steeped in moral outrage out of what was initially just a small molehill.

I am of course, referring to the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand lewd phone calls situation. Now, I think everybody realises that Ross and Brand overstepped the mark of what were acceptable parameters for comedy. But, anyone would think that the pair of them had committed the crime of the century given the amount of press hysteria that it generated. A full week passed after the episode had been broadcast on Radio 2 before the story broke in the newspapers, and it was the Mail that broke the story. From there, all hell broke loose and outrage frenzy that the Mail generated resulted in the BBC receiving over 30,000 complaints.

It is worth bearing in mind, however, that at the time of the transmission, the programme received the grand sub-total of 2 complaints. And neither of these complaints were in relation to the lewd content of Ross and Brand's telephone messages for Andrew Sachs but because Jonathan Ross swore, albeit in a programme that went out at 9:15 on a Saturday night. So how on earth did 2 complaints snowball to 30,000? And how many of the 30,000 complainants had actually heard a full transmission? It is true that a number of people could have retrospectively complained about the broadcast by listening to a podcast of the show in the days that followed. But I very much doubt that the people who complained would have been avid users of a podcast facility and I expect of those that did, most only had the sudden urge to do so when they saw an opportunity to complain via the outraged pages of the Daily Mail.

The two newspapers that made the biggest song and dance over the story were the Mail and The Sun. The Sun building the story up for far greater than it was worth was not that surprising however, given that a scandal at the BBC is bound to be jumped on by a newspaper that so happens to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also so happens to be the magnate of one of the Beeb's chief competitors, Sky. Nothing like kicking your rivals while they are down and milking a scandal affecting them for all it is worth. But The Mail's location of its moral compass seemed to be more geared around providing its readers with a convenient platform to complain about society's ills.

The Mail has long been an opponent of the BBC chiefly because it is opposed to the licence fee. And what better amunition to support its stance against this BBC tax than to emphasise the folly of the fee contributing towards the highest paid employee's £6 million a year salary when that employee then goes and brings shame on himself and his bosses. I do not wish to use this article to talk about the arguments for or against a licence fee other than to say that a licence that works out at £11.62 a month is pretty decent value when compared to subscription based television and when it pays for the BBC's wide range of programming output including its excellent natural history programmes, documentaries, current affairs output and top drama and comedy, not to mention its commitment to innovation, BBC iPlayer being a very good example. The Mail's main argument against a licence fee is that it is a forced tax which pays for, what in its mind, is viewing for the minority and which differs from its political agenda. The Mail being the champion of middle England doesn't like any form of tax and so the BBC with its licence fee is a sworn enemy.

A line I have seen spun by Mail columnists in both print and also when they have appeared on television is that the BBC "no longer represents the interests of public service broadcasting". Absolutely right it doesn't, because while Mail columnists may like to cling on those halcyon days of newsreaders speaking with a stiff upper lip, weather forecasters having to use magnetic symbols rather than computer generations in order to show the next day's weather outlook and those terribly quaint Pathe news reels telling everybody in patronising tone about a state visit from the US President of the time, their perception of what public service broadcasting is and what it should be is as dead as a dodo. Time has moved on and in order to stay ahead of the game and remain innovative and reach the changing demands of its audience, so the BBC has had to adjust accordingly. So while Mail columnists will tell you that the BBC have wasted their time by plugging BBC Three and BBC Four because nobody watches them, the BBC are clearly mindful of a digital revolution. In 2012, the analogue signal is turned off for good, meaning that anyone who owns a television will have access to these channels, and so consequently, over time their audience figures will rise. Also, given that programmes such as Gavin and Stacey and Lead Balloon started out on BBC3 and are now being shown on the two main BBC channels, that would suggest enough people watched them on BBC3 in the first place to suggest there would be a demand for a bigger audience to watch these programmes.

The Mail's hate campaign against Ross shows no sign of abating. They want blood and clearly they will not stop campaigning until Ross is eventually forced out of the BBC. There are two reasons for their dislike of Ross. Firstly, he earns £6 million a year and they do not think he is worth it. Secondly, he is very fiercely protective of his private life and on more than one occasion now, he has taken out injunctions through his lawyers to prevent newspapers or glossy magazines from showing photographs of him on holiday with his family or playing with his children in the park. After Andrew Sachs's privacy was invaded courtesy of the most expensive prank calls in history, this leads the newspapers to smell some hypocrisy in the air and the hacks don't like hypocrisy, unless of course it is perpetrated by the newspapers and then it just gets swept under the carpet or an apology appears on page 23.

Back on the salary for a second, the key thing to note here is that Jonathan Ross did not ask to be paid £6 million. The BBC offered it to him as at the time that his contract was negotiated, a rival network were prepared to offer Ross a king's ransom to acquire his services. Market forces were at work, but clearly as the BBC regarded Ross as their trump card, rightly so in my opinion, then they were absolutely right to pay the going rate in order to ensure that they retained his services. Obviously, Ross has put himself and his employers in a difficult position now because to many, the justification for paying that salary went the moment he informed Andrew Sachs of whose bed his granddaughter had been in. Nonetheless, there is one thing above all that I do not like about the Mail's pursuance on this matter.

The bugbear that I have is that the Daily Mail believes itself to be a champion of fairness and of democracy. Right, fair enough. However, thanks to the Mail's vehement campaign to get its readers to contact the BBC and complain about the broadcast, it has resulted in a situation where viewers and listeners who would never ordinarily watch or listen to Ross's broadcasts have forced him off air and this has deprived the legions of fans of Wossy who do watch his chat show, film programme and listen to his Saturday morning Radio 2 show from being able to do so because the "moral majority" have helpfully decided that there is no place for him on the BBC, despite the fact that they don't watch or listen to his broadcasts anyway. Quite what form of democracy this is I do not know, but it does seem that viewers have been penalised by a bunch of do-gooders. And I thought that the Mail didn't like do-gooders either.

Ross, I am sure will be back once his suspension is served at the end of January, but it will take a long time before he is able to restore himself to being the kingpin of light entertainment because he is always just one mild flirtation, one utterance of an obscenity or one near the knuckle punchline away from offending some Mavis or Dorothy in Curtaintwitcherland and then prompting the next witch-hunt. It seems ironic, that given that the Daily Mail is a champion of free speech that we find ourselves at the moment in a situation where anybody who says anything remotely controversial, even when it is obviously in jest, find themselves being subjected to calls to be sacked by those faceless people who seem to think they are our moral guardians. A classic example of this came with Jeremy Clarkson recently, never a man to be taken at face value, but who found himself with his head on the block after he made an off the cuff remark about lorry drivers on an episode of Top Gear. Clearly Clarkson was just making a cheap gag, but there was no need for people to get on their high horse.

I hold the Daily Mail responsible for whipping up this recent spate of moral outrage. Maybe it is a sign of the times that because the country is feeling the pinch and we are heading for a recession that people feel they have more of a right to air their grievances, but I think that the constant stream of inflammatory headlines and tarty editorials that the Mail runs are contributory factors for this hysteria.

One last thing about Ross before we move on. I happened to read the Daily Mail early last week and turned to Richard Littlejohn's column. Littlejohn is the type of jumped up, little Englander columnist who typically writes for the Mail and the only thing balanced about him is that he wears a chip on both his shoulders. Anyway, in his column he declared his disgust that The Guardian newspaper was giving away free wrapping paper that had supposedly been designed by Jonathan Ross, ending with the throwaway line "What next, free Gary Glitter pyjamas?" A cheap shot and surely whatever one thinks of Ross or what he has done, comparing him to a convicted paedophile goes way over the boundary of acceptable banter. Ross will not need the money, even with his current suspension, but if he read these remarks by Littlejohn, I think he would be well within his rights to take legal action against both Littlejohn and the newspaper over comments that could be construed as a defamation of character.

As part of my preparation for writing this article, I have read articles from the Mail during the course of this week, although I would like to point out that I have not wasted any money on purchasing this glorified Izal at any point. When reading the paper, I tried to think of words that would sum up the writing style of the paper and the tone of its articles. Plenty of words sprang to mind, but I cannot say that any of them were particularly positive and I will keep a few of them back as this is a family blog. Among the cleaner words that I felt were particularly apt were vitriolic, misleading, inflammatory, gloomy, spiteful, bitchy, vengeful, nauseating and abhorrent.

There was one particularly nauseating piece I recall reading on the same day as the Littlejohn remark which was a double page spread on Britney Spears. Britney is kind of gold dust for the Daily Mail and its readership. A girl from a poor background in the US's deep south, who found fame at a young age but who has fallen upon hard times and who fell in with the wrong crowd and has seen her children taken away from her. The Mail likes a good story about irresponsible parenting and the cult of fallen celebrity so its star studded crew of bitchy female writers can sit in judgement and make unkind remarks, presumably for no other reason than that they envy the subject's looks or lifestyle, if not what that lifestyle has made them.

The piece on Ms Spears was partly in relation to her miming act on the X Factor which I am not in a position to comment on given that I don't watch programmes where the judges regard themselves as bigger stars than the contestants, hence why I have also gone off of Strictly Come Dancing. But anyway, the bit which I found particularly distasteful in the Mail's piece was its description of Britney "possibly going mad".

Now, there are clearly a number of contributory factors that have led to Britney Spears's life spiralling out of control, her drink and drug dependencies certainly being significant factors and I would say that these may have been a bi-product of her finding fame at a young age and being pushed into being a child performer by her parents. But, what is certainly a fact is that Britney Spears has been diagnosed with a mental health condition and has received treatment for this. She has suffered from manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is more commonly referred to now, and I gather she also suffered from symptoms of personality disorder, which if I understand mental health treatments correctly, is currently one form of mental illness that is not treatable through prescribed medication.

The Daily Mail's use of the word "mad" I felt was grossly inappropriate and it is use of strong, emphatic words like "mad", "insane", "lunatic", "psycho" and "nutter" when referring to people suffering from a mental health condition that results in people perceiving someone who is mentally ill as being a second class citizen, incapable or a danger to society. Everyone generalises and makes snap judgements to some degree or another in life as it is a defence mechanism, people have their principles and assessments which they have to ensure their safety and those of the people they are close to. That much is understood, but the use of such powerful, emotive and derogatory words and phrases does at times result in people being labelled and stigmatised. One in five people will at some point suffer a psychotic or neurotic episode in their life. Does that mean that one in five of us are mad or insane or crazy? Of course not. Mental health problems take many forms and there are many circumstances that trigger them, bereavement, relationship breakdowns, financial difficulties, violence, unemployment, addictions, to name but a few examples. These are common everyday problems that affect all of us at some point and so all of us are potentially fragile to a breakdown, especially as life in general is more pressurised and stressful than 15 or 20 years ago.

By the Mail referring to the madness of Britney Spears, it marginalised not just her but anyone out there who is dealing with or who has overcome a mental health condition. It should not worry Britney so much as I doubt she is a regular reader of the Daily Mail, but I am sure there were other people reading that article thinking that the Mail's ill advised use of language which was used just to produce a rather tactless and tasteless piece who will have been less than impressed by the Mail devaluing them and taking people back to Victorian times of the mentally ill being detained in "mad houses" with squalid conditions, akin to being in prison.

When the Mail is not being derogatory or inflammatory, it finds a way of being utterly trivial over completely irrelevant matters. A classic example was to be found in today's edition of the Mail On Sunday where it reported that a mother of an eight year old child was outraged to find out that the Nintendo Scrabble game that she had recently purchased her young Herbert was programmed so that the computer opponent could lay swear words, including the word "tits". Clearly, the mother and the Mail both know their anatomy but seem a little less clued up on their ornithology because the great thing about the English language is that so many words have separate meanings and the way that language evolves, over time I am sure that further meanings will enter the language. OK, maybe the designers of the game could have thought of programming in a swear filter wherever children were playing the game, but I am sure that young Herbert has heard worse language in the school playground. And that's just the teachers.

As a keen online Scrabble player myself, I have played many games in the past where I have laid much filthier words than what Herbert's artificial intelligence opponent laid in the knowledge that if the word is in the official Scrabble dictionary, it is a word and if it will get me some all important points on a triple word score then I will sacrifice some of my clean cut image in order to satisfy my competitive instincts. Given that the Mail and some of its tabloid companions are forever bemoaning the lack of competitiveness in schools because of "health and safety" and "mental scarring" and other such reasons, maybe we should encourage child players to broaden their vocabulary extensively in order to be competitive at Scrabble. After all, I bet a good number of us amateur Scrabble players started out by looking up a few choice vulgarities in the dictionary.

I could go on for hours about why I dislike the Daily Mail and what it stands for, but I think by now you probably understand the gist of my reasoning. It is a newspaper that yearns for and appeals to a Britain that no longer exists, almost like an Arian race. It is a newspaper that does not like people sticking their nose into other people's affairs and likes everyone to have a freedom of choice, and yet it has shown time and again the hypocrisy of its stance by constantly being a voyeur in other people's affairs and casting its self-righteous judgements and sometimes, this has removed other people's freedoms.

Added to which it is a newspaper that blows everything out of proportion with its constant scare mongering and outrage on the same cycle of recurring themes. That is not to say that these themes should not be explored, clearly we live in an imperfect country and an imperfect society. But the Mail's far right, draconian attitude just produces sensationalist headlines but nothing by way of advising on possible practical solutions. The Daily Telegraph is a newspaper whose politics lean to the right and makes no apologies for it, but it does at least analyse and rationalise. The Mail is just a vehicle for intolerant scribes with intolerant opinions. Consequently, people take what they read in the Mail as a true reflection when many times it presents a distorted picture. When this distorted picture is helping to form opinions, sometimes hysterical ones, particularly at a time of instability, then this is something to be concerned about.

I have come to the conclusion that the people who the editorial team of the Daily Mail are aiming its newspaper at are the very paper you would least wish to live next door to. The person who is always twitching the curtains commenting on what you or Mrs Smith at number 56 is up to. The person who asks you turn your music down even when it is mid-afternoon. The person who objects to you having a shed because it might block the light. The person who forever parks too far down and blocks you right in. The person who is obsessed by property prices and no doubt keeps the best biscuits for themselves at the local Residents' Association Meeting. We treat people of this ilk with contempt when we come across them in real life, therefore it is about time we treat their newspaper of choice with the contempt it deserves too and only purchase it in times of emergency. Namely, when we run out of Andrex.