Five Chinese Crackers has a great analysis (exposé?) of one of the Daily Mail’s endless ‘political correctness gone mad’ articles. Well worth reading… and pretty hilarious. Click!

Everybody knows that the Daily Mail loves nothing more than to print anti-BBC stories. But really, this latest attempt breaks new ground, even for the Mail.

The story is that the presenter of the BBC’s flagship news bulletin, Huw Edwards, was wearing a poppy which fell off just before the programme went to air. So in the first report, he picked it up and reattached it. Fascinating stuff.

In the world of the Daily Mail, though:

When BBC Ten O’Clock news presenter Huw Edwards took to the news-room floor during Monday night’s bulletin – viewers were immediately alerted to the fact that he has forgotten something – his poppy. Viewers were doubly confused when the poppy suddenly appeared on Edwards jacket after the broadcaster cut away to an interview with its top political correspondent Nick Robinson some way into the show.

Terribly confusing for all concerned, I’m sure. But far from jumping to the obvious conclusion, Daily Mail readers

could have been forgiven for thinking that the PC brigade were at it again

Somehow, the Mail then draws a connection between a poppy falling off someone’s jacket, and the fact that the Beeb have decided that ‘distracting’ religious symbols might not be the best idea on a newsreader – or, in the world of the Daily Mail, banned Fiona Bruce from wearing a cross. Which, incidentally, was blatantly untrue.

How on Earth does something this stupid make the pages of a national newspaper? It’s astonishing, even from the Daily Mail.

But my favourite bit of the article is this:

The poppy incident marked an eventual [sic] night for the Welsh news-reader after it was revealed that a contagious eye infection almost caused him to miss his broadcast.

Eventual?

From last week’s Friday Thing:

‘A third of the population regularly suffer paranoid or suspicious fears that others intend to harm them, say researchers,’ reported the Daily Mail this week. Apparently psychologists at King’s College London have found that a worryingly large proportion of people believe others intend to do them harm or are criticising them behind their backs. The research suggests that paranoia could be as widespread as depression or anxiety.

Exactly why we’re all so paranoid isn’t clear, but one explanation could well be: ‘It’s because you’re reading the Daily fucking Mail.’

The *same* edition contained the following headlines:

– Will Britons be forced to eat hormone injected beef?

– Security bosses keep terror watch on 1,200 homegrown fanatics

– Schoolgirls’ websites make them prey for paedophiles

– Migrant housing cheats

– Child protection police chief ‘throttled girls’

– The freak accident that left my son obsessed with sex

– You’re eating the WRONG fruit and veg

– IS YOUR X-RAY SAFE?

– TRAPPED IN HER BED FOR 14 YEARS

And, perhaps best of all:

– Is going to the gym BAD for your health? – Lurking on the dumbells. Hidden in the towels. The millions of killer bacteria festering in your gym.’

Yes, millions of deadly bacteria, all waiting to get you, like microscopic Viet Cong. It’s a miracle that regular Daily Mail readers don’t just kill themselves and have done – blissful release from a world of fear and loathing. Or maybe they’re happier that way. As Sparks so eloquently put it: ‘My parents say the world is cruel. I think that they prefer it cruel.’

It’s worth mentioning, too, that for the last little while, The Friday Thing has been free… I’ve always said it was worth signing up for – and that’s true now more than ever!

There’s not much in life that’s more entertaining than reading the Mail’s sometimes ridiculous claims. Look, for example, here:

The Daily Mail was the first national newspaper to bring Sudoku to this country

Well, no it wasn’t. It’s not true. It’s plainly false. The Times first published Su Doku. Then the Mail picked it up, decided it’s readers couldn’t cope with a ‘foreign’ name, and called it Numbercrunch. The Times was first.

while the Mail on Sunday went one further with the introduction of Super Sudoku

The first Super Su Doku was published in the Indy. Not the Mail.

You might think that this is a minor correction… but the Mail splashed over half its front page that it was first. And it wasn’t. Besides which, as entertaining as Su Doku is as a puzzle, there really isn’t all that much to say about it, and its becoming quite frustrating to not be able to open a paper without some special feature or other about a number puzzle.

And just as I was about to hit ‘Publish’, it appears that Janine Gibson from The Grauniad has written along similar lines. Choice quotes:

Kudos, by the way, to Sun Doku which launched on Tuesday and distinguished itself immediately by being a puzzle that someone else has already half completed. The Guardian launched its own version on Monday, sprinting for the high ground with “the original Japanese puzzles hand-crafted by its inventors” and gently putting the boot in to the computer versions run by other papers. The others responded with suitable outrage. “We were first,” said the Times. “We’ve got four!” shouted the Independent. Sighs from baffled readers everywhere.

[T]he first Sudoku puzzle hit the UK press in the Times six months ago. The Daily Mail launched one shortly thereafter, though it was called Codebreaker and everyone else ignored it. In fact the Mail was in danger of being written out of the collective history of the Sudoku Phenomenon as it emerged day by day last week, until it devoted half of its front page to a bold “we was first” claim. It’s possible the Mail may now be regretting eschewing the Japanese name, which we can only assume it did in case its readers got upset by the idea of it being foreign.

And, I think, a perfect one to finish on:

I propose a truce. We’ve all got one now, let’s just leave it alone. Do the puzzle, don’t do the puzzle, just don’t talk about it.

This would appear to be good news, though it’s noticeable that the North-East still has a much higher rate than the rest of the country:

These rates are clearly still high, but at least they’re moving in the right direction. Clearly, someone’s forgotten to point that out to the Daily Mail, who are reporting that

The number of teenage girls getting pregnant has risen, new statistics show.

The difference is that the Times take the logical approach of reporting the pregnancy rate, whereas The Daily Mail choose to report using the raw figures, which it is clearly absurd to compare year-on-year. But they have done. So either they’re bottom of the maths class, or they just want to scaremonger. You decide.

More controversial is the bit tagged on to the Times article:

Abortions are at an all-time high, reaching 18.6 per 1,000 women in March last year. The number aged 30-34 having abortions doubled between 1976 and 2003, to 14,600. The total number of all ages having abortions in 2003 was 190,700.

I don’t have a problem with this, but I’m fairly sure someone will have. And to think, the Daily Mail wouldn’t have needed to fiddle the figures if it had just gotten its knickers in a twist about this.

Someone explain to me how a phone vote can be void? I mean, COME ON! Isn’t the real story here that over 100,000 people who read the Daily Mail are so damn stupid that they can’t even manage to vote in a simple poll without messing it up?!? Or is this a case of reducing the number of “No” votes through a bit of figure fiddling? No, the DM has too much honesty and integrity to do that. Yeah right.

Originally posted on The LBSC

As my more astute readers will doubtless have noticed, it’s Sunday. So I thought I’d post something relevant. I haven’t done that for the past four years, and probably never will again, but that’s by-the-by.

I have just come across this new advert from the Mail on Sunday: It’s quite extraordinary. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to be advertising The News of the World, but it would seem that the Mail has finally given up on trying to be respectable, and trying to be “not as bad as” the Daily Mail.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/mailonsunday2.flv” title=”Mail on Sunday Advert” ratio=”16:9″ picture=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/mailpic.JPG” /]

I don’t think I need to write any further commentary, really.

Richard Littlejohn in last week’s Daily Mail:

How long before the ludicrous Faye Turney pops up on Celebrity Fat Club? I bet they didn’t let her get in the dinghy first. This is a woman who is capable of capsizing the Ark Royal if she shifts her weight to the wrong cheek.

This is the newspaper, remember, that claims to have endless respect for our armed forces and says they deserve nothing but the best.

The day Faye Turney sold her story to The Sun and Tonight With Trevor McDonald was the day the Navy died of shame.

Presumably, it wouldn’t be so shameful if she’d sold her story to the Daily Mail, who made her a huge offer for it.

How on Earth is this vitriolic rag one of Britain’s most successful ‘newspapers’? And what on Earth does that say about us as a nation? I dread to think.

The most respected journal of weekly news takes on the most austere and professional of the BBC’s journalists… or not. The rag and the hag have had a bit of a tiff. (For those unfamiliar with the key players, one’s ‘Not as bad as the Daily Mail’ and the other fronted a massive cock-up).

A couple of weeks back, the Mail on Sunday did a big two-page spread about how all but one of Natasha Kaplinsky’s family had been rounded up, shot, and dumped in a ditch by the Nazis. Her grandfather was the sole survivor. A terrible, tragic fate.

Except the story may have contained one or two tiny errors.

As MediaGuardian are now reporting, the person the Mail on Sunday thought was Natasha’s grandfather actually wasn’t, Natasha’s family were not killed, and the people who were killed were not slaughtered in a mass execution. And they weren’t shot and dumped in a ditch, either.

In fact, it’s quite difficult to find much about the story that is true. Much like a lot of the Mail on Sunday’s reportage, then.

Just when you thought the Daily Mail had hit rock bottom, they’re now insisting on referring persistently to  the parliamentary commissioner for standards as “the Commons sleaze watchdog”.  One really has to feel sorry for Sir Philip Mawer.