Deconstructing the Daily Mail

Sometimes it’s difficult to articulate why we need a different media when so much of it is broken, owned and manipulative; full of poisoned values or gushing with moron culture, so thank you to the Daily Mail for encapsulating in one front page everything that is wrong with Britain today.

Breaking it down from the top right we have the graphic celebrating climate change “Hottest March Day in 53 years” (!)

The main visual is of course a 1966 World Cup reference – thrown in gratuitously but not sure whether to condemn or celebrate people being in the park – there’s a hesitancy between the Mail’s automatic condemnation of young people (hooligans) and random right-wing libertarianism – which is resistant to any collective action – and condemns any restriction on business as usual. Caught between their opposing instinctive toxic impulses they opted for both: blurting out an image that was vague enough to hint at both without committing to either – with a bikini-clad girl thrown into the mix for no particular reason. Alot of this works on a level where agendas are just hinted at – and the reader is so immersed in this reality that subliminal messaging glides over with remarkable ease.

But the main event was really gaslighting an entire society of people waking up to police brutality and endemic racism, rubbishing black lives matter and denying peoples lived reality.  Celebrating the UK as a “model to the world” is not just some astonishing denial it is triumphalism and propaganda in the context of the most repressive legislation and an assault on civil liberties from the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

 

 

This week we were told that the police actions at the  Sarah Everard vigil was fine – now they’re telling you that racism doesn’t exist.

The tabloids frenzy of Hyper Unionism, British nationalism and denial is reaching new heights, as the police violence and intimidation does too. The stripping of a woman at a protest against sexual violence, the thuggery against a 16 year old boy, the assault on protestors in Bristol are all part of a new performative brutality – a new form of state violence and paramilitary policing. This violence needs to be framed and anyone showing resistance needs to be demonised and marginalised, this is the role and the function of the media like the Daily Mail.

Post-covid, post-Brexit Britain is a dangerous place, we need a new media to translate the dangers and to share the resistance.

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Comments (24)

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  1. Squigglypen says:

    Well you know the answer for Scotland…starts with an I***********…..leave you to fill in the blanks.
    Hitler’s idea for domination…short slogans…..and lots of flags ….does this sound familiar?
    Get Brexit done! Lots of union flags on council buildings…
    We just need the salute……oops! forgot ..we’ve got the curtsey….
    There all sorted.
    (Luckily we’ve got Bella and the National.)

  2. Chris Ballance says:

    Proudly producing fake news for a century, since the Zinoviev letter, invented to scupper the country’s first Labour government.

    1. Alasdair Macdonald says:

      Of course Bodger Broon was a great chum of Paul Dacre who was for a long time the editor of the Daily Mail.

  3. John Docherty says:

    Your take on the actual Nazi supporting Daily Heil is spot on.
    Unfortunately I feel unable to offer financial support to your efforts for one reason. The denial that Private Schools in Scotland and England , particularly in Embra, are the core of the UK apartheid class war .
    Still wish you all the best in support for Scotland to be run from Scotland.

    1. Wul says:

      It’s so hard to find a cause that agrees with your views 100% on very issue isn’t it?

      I hope you eventually find a source that mirrors your thinking perfectly. It will need to be run by a corporation or billionaire however, because all the independent sources will have been starved out of existence. Until then, carry on reading for free here.

  4. James Mills says:

    The UK is a ”model to the world for diversity ” – of course it is !

    We have a diverse media owned by a diverse collection of billionaires from all across the world ;
    we have diverse political sponsors from many diverse rich families including crime ones ( probably ) ;
    we have people from diverse ethnic backgrounds in Government helping increase the number of Food Banks ;
    we have a growing number of police officers from diverse ethnic communities helping quash peaceful protest at the behest of the diverse Public School Boys ruining the country ( no typo );
    we have falling numbers of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds dying in police care but still few if any prosecutions of the police officers responsible ;
    we even have a black woman married to one of our beloved Princes – just a pity she had to leave the country for diverse reasons NOT to do with race , we are told .

  5. SleepingDog says:

    Reminds my of this bizarre BBC piece from 2014 about the British military training the Burmese Army to respect human rights and international norms:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-25855168
    given the UK government’s strenous attempts to avoid its military being subject to any such. Why not recap British imperial relations with Burma to see where modern Mynanmar might have got a lot of their ideas from?

  6. Space Hugo says:

    It’s even worse than the moronic jingoism highlighted in the article. A close friend worked for both the Hate Mail and sister rag the No Standard and the culture was unrepentantly corrupt, priding itself on its cynicism. The ideology, the politics, is almost entirely limited to the management. The hacks had no principles at all. They just needed the job, so fell in line.

  7. Stewart Bremner says:

    Utterly grim. Also, note the use of Fahrenheit and not Celsius, because of course. “Imperial, by gosh, not any of that heathen French mumbo jumbo, what!!”

  8. H Scott says:

    This is great news. The lack of institutional racism in the UK is testament to the essential decency of the British people.

  9. Michael says:

    “… now they’re telling you that racism doesn’t exist.” Mike misreporting again! The report doesn’t say that racism doesn’t exist. It says that it didn’t find evidence of it and that it did find evidence that class has a significant impact on people’s life chances. This is a very important distinction and deserves to be taken seriously. Of course, the bankers (who we know are not conspiring to get ever richer – it is just a coincidence!) love Mike’s rage-filled intersectionality rants that mislead and distracts us from the really significant issues in society – i.e., you can shout racism, misogyny, sexism as all day long and have all the rights and self-labelling as you like, but if you continue to let the financial system push us ALL (yes, this includes lots of those terrible white males too) into poverty, then real choice, freedom and opportunity are destroyed. Good luck fighting for your own enslavement by an enlightened(morally and ethically corrupt), diverse, androgynous tech/finance elite.

    1. Pub Bore says:

      Yes, its conclusion is that people are more disadvantaged by class than by ethnic origin in accessing social goods. More controversially, perhaps, is its conclusion that there is little evidence of institutional racism. I’m tempted to study the full report to see what definition of institutional racism it assumes. Different assumptions produce different conclusions.

      Anyhoo: for anyone who’s really interested in the Commission’s findings, rather than how they might be spun, the unmediated report can be found here – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities – from where you can also follow the links to the supporting research.

      1. John Learmonth says:

        Who’d beleive it, Class (however defined) is by far and away the most important determinant of a persons life chances.
        Ethnicity (however defined) is largely (but not totally irrelevant).
        So people from Indian/chinese heritage are more likely to attend the best uni’s and earn more than ‘white’ people, hence lets dump the stupid acroynm ‘BAME’.
        Meanwhile ‘black’ people from Africa do better than both ‘black’ people from caribbean backgrounds or ‘white’ working class people.
        Humanity…….its not a matter of black and white and its not ‘rascist’ to point this out.

        1. Asserting that racism doesn’t really exist is problematic.

          1. Pub Bore says:

            It sure is. And racism itself – the reduction of our social ills to considerations of ‘race’ – is, like all such reductions, deeply problematic. It shouldn’t be ignored.

    2. Dear Michael
      thanks for your lovely comment, I’m afraid I’ll take the analysis and response of the dozens of people of colour over yours, thanks. The ones I have read are overwhelmingly angry about this whitewash.

      As Amer Anwar has written: “The conclusions of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities were written long before 10 so-called “experts” were appointed by Boris Johnson. Not a single expert was recognisable within the BAME community, in fact the inquiry faced a massive backlash the day its panel was announced.”

      “This #RacismReport wants to glorify slavery & says we need a “new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slavery period not only being about profit & suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain”.

      As Simon Wooley has written:

      “This report has almost no answers to the plethora of inequalities that Covid has uncovered, in education, health, housing and employment. To have published it any time in the last 20 years would have been seen as a whitewash; to do so after the months of heartache and the awareness-raising of the past year is almost criminally negligent.

      It’s a huge missed opportunity, when the nation feels ready for change and open to the idea of real, long-lasting work to undo the scourge of racism.

      Imagine for a moment that instead of denigrating the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors who rallied to the cause of Black Lives Matter, and patronisingly accusing them of “well-meaning idealism”, the government and its race commission chose to listen to them. It would hear about the lived experience of young Black people being nine times more likely to be stopped and searched and twice as likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic. Only last week, the Guardian reported on the state of racial inequality in education, with Black headteachers saying that their lives had been made miserable by years of microaggressions.

      This should have been our 1945 moment: a time when, as a nation, we could be big and bold enough not only to acknowledge historic and continuing embedded racism, but come up with a plan to deal with it.”

      Your comment operates under the false assumption that racism or sexism somehow supersede social class and economic inequality, which they clearly don’t and Ive never suggested they do.

      1. florian albert says:

        For some reason, Bella Caledonia has chosen this time to ‘deconstruct’ the Daily Mail. In doing so, Bella Caledonia has descended into what the late Tony Judt called the ‘cesspit of theory.’ Tony Judt was clearly hinting that those who go there do not come out of the experience well . And so it has happened. Bella Caledonia made a statement that the Daily Mail was telling people that ‘racism doesn’t exist.’ ( ‘Michael’ charitably called that ‘misreporting.’ ) The statement is a fabrication.
        Bella Caledonia – so quick to see and denounce others’ poison – needs to look in the mirror and see the ugliness there.

        1. Why is it wrong to analyse tabloid news culture?

          1. florian albert says:

            Plainly, there is nothing wrong with analysing tabloid culture.
            The problem arises when you accuse a tabloid newspaper – or anybody else – of writing something that they did not in fact write.
            You acquire what used to be called a credibility problem.
            With the Scottish Left in the feeble condition it is today, that is the last thing anybody in the Scottish Left needs.

          2. Thanks for the wonderful advice

    3. Jim Sansbury says:

      Que?

  10. Lynsey Stuart says:

    76 degrees? I see they’ve reverted to fahrenheit. I have no idea how warm 76 is. I had to check how to spell fahrenheit.

    I see No. 10’s race adviser has resigned https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/apr/01/no-10-race-adviser-resigns-day-after-uk-structural-racism-report-published

    1. Pub Bore says:

      ’76’ is far more spectacular a number than ’24’ is probably the explanation.

      https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/dec/29/newspapers-run-hot-and-cold-over-celsius-and-fahrenheit

  11. Ken wilson says:

    A vile newspaper that is hugely popular and taps into a class that feels maligned. It is very skilfully put together with its fear tactics and gadening tips. Do not ever underestimate the Mail.

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