Mail – key source of disinformation
Sometimes we just miss the signs – or at least I do.
I’ve always known the Mail was a rag but it had certain things going for it. It’s the most popular online newspaper in the world, the type of people who comment there seem to be in the same general area of politics on most of the issues as I am, it’s entertaining, with the most fabulous photography and they DO find the stories from all around the world.
So if some atrocity has happened, they’ll track it down. They came out with the Common Purpose Leveson thing, they take on the high flyers, they took on Rebekah Brooks whom I can’t stand. They took on Mensch – ditto. In the morning I might go to the Telegraph for the news, then the Mail to see what they say and then to fellow bloggers to see what they’ve picked up on.
Yet there are warning signs all over the place and I should have picked up on them. I didn’t. Long ago, Cherie said not to believe anything there and I still dispute that in the sense that they do identify issues no other paper will touch, they do get the hospital name right or the Washington sleaze but in that very statement is one of the problems – it is all sleaze they identify.
That came out just now [I've just clicked out] when they had stories on someone sawing someone else’s spine, schoolgirl pretending to be a boy to take someone’s virginity, taxpayer funded sex changes, “yob killed autistic gay teenager at his 18th birthday party by covering him in tanning oil and setting his groin alight,” and so on and so on.
Maybe it was because there were just so many of these – it went on and on and on and then there are the mutated animals they show big pics of and “women who wash intimate areas with shower gels and soaps ‘increase their risk of sexually transmitted infections’” and I started to think – hey, I don’t like these things. A few nasty stories – OK – but this is a steady diet of them.
Femail has always worried me, not for showing nublie women but for showing lowlife women and holding them up as good. This one though stopped me now and made me think: ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God’: Watch what happened when two screaming, retching men were forced to watch a woman giving birth.
I started to think – when did they last show ordinary, normal men doing ordinary things or even heroic things – saving people etc.? But they always show women in heroic situations.
Narrative.
Then I thought back to how they also portray women as pathetic creatures who always mess things up and hey – what exactly is going on here?
What brought it to a head was yesterday when I tried to leave a comment correcting the commenters on who was behind Leveson’s attempt to control the press. Common Purpose. That became a post at OoL and a bit of a rant against the Mail’s blocking tactics.
Wolfie commented:
I have gone to great lengths to explain this to my wife time and time again, the Daily Mail is not a “right wing” paper. It is a disinformation instrument. Stop wasting your time, close that tab.
Thinking about it – yes, it is a disinformation instrument. It takes a political point of view or area of the society as a product and plays to the product without believing any of it. They were determined to push this “rich people behind Leveson, who are they” thing, which neatly sidestepped CP. And in came the commenters asking oh, whoever could that be? That vague Them up there who don’t care for us.
It’s all product. It’s all theatre and unwittingly, we are theatre too – the centre-right UKIP types who comment at the Telegraph and Mail and have given up on the Guardian and Independent. Tea Party types. We see ourselves as ordinary people of the UK who’ve had enough and we identify all the atrocities, all the corruption above and perhaps that’s exactly what we’re manipulated to do, like marionettes.
I do believe in all those people I’ve corresponded with and am sure they’re genuine but let’s face it, our primary sources are in the news media and a narrow range of that media. And they’re desperate to get the bad news to us to make us feel worse or to be up in arms and rail against things till we lose our nerves.
Endless tales of atrocity, the overt sexism and then overt misandry to go with it have the effect of dulling the senses to these things. Until yesterday when I thought – enough of this. So where can I go for news? Toynbee at the Guardian?
Filed under: Politics & economics, Society & human issues
I could hear the penny dropping from here. Well done that man.
When you find out where to get some unbiased properly reported real news let us know pronto will you as the source will be shut down within the day.
I’ve been reading the Mail online now and again, invariably i skim through the utter negative garbage and try to find one of Peter Hitchens increasingly rare articles to bring a brief moment of reality to the surreal tripe that surrounds it.
If it wasn’t for the blogs i read, and thankyou bloggers, i’d have gone gaga years ago.
Its possible to feel quite alone holding what are quite normal views, the bloggers are the few talking common sense.
Keep it up for a lot of our sakes.
Regards
Judd
There is always the online Telegraph whose third most widely read article today is entitled
“Why I don’t want to be Beyoncé’s bitch”
Perhaps Mail news is mechanically generated, like Orwell’s prolefeed novels.
Mechanically generated – buzzwords likely to get people in. For example, in my own posts – Constitution, patriotism, immigration, political correctness – that’s likely to be a conservative libertarian or thereabouts so people of a certain mindset might group towards it.
If I was writing of equality, fairness, progressive, modern, C21st, it might be a different type of reader. That’s why I trust certain bloggers and readers only. I know there are trolls too and people trying to waste time, tie up and confuse but I think I know honest people too.
It’s getting so that it’s help ourselves because no one else is going to help us.
James Higham recently posted…The Constitution
Pace Wolfie, the Daily Mail is not about disinformation, but about money, in the same way that Cameron is about office (I was going to say power, but that might imply wanting to do something). Like Sky, it is successful by appealing to widely varied – even mutually detesting – groups.
If you want to see the soul of a paper, look at its comic strip page. The Mail’s is interesting, in its attempt to be every colour of the middlebrow rainbow.
James – you should know by now that newspapers are works of fiction
the only thing that is true is the date at the top
(and even that is illegal – according to law the only legitimate measures of time are seconds, minutes, hours and days.
Months, years and names of specific days are not allowed under weights and measures legislation)
…confirming my previous comment-
http://eureferendum.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/media-more-accuracy-from-mail.html
Here is some more exposition from someone who’s opinion I respect :
http://inversions-and-deceptions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/trivialised-does-as-trivialised-is.html
The Labour Party, and the House of Commons, are however merely the political symbols of a revolution that goes well beyond Westminster. Every other cultural institution of significance — the BBC, Oxford [4], research funding bodies, the Arts Council — has had a similar revolution, and a similar new guard installed which is now immovably entrenched. All that remains is a generation who remember different values, and who are permitted to become the grumbling old — “grumblies” — complaining, but mostly in the self-deprecating and degraded style of The Oldie magazine. Their principal organ is the Daily Mail — despised and largely impotent, but allowed to exist as a safety valve for resentment, to defuse the risk of grumbly riots. Soon the grumblies will be safely retired or dead, and they and the old bourgeois values will have been finally expunged. No one will know that there was ever a viewpoint different from the mediocratic one.
I must admit I was starting to think you were ignoring my comments, I’m relieved that is not the case.