I feel really guilty at the moment. There’s something I must confess to. I just have to get it off my chest.
I bought the Daily Mail on Saturday.
I know, I know. It was the TV ad that did it for me. It’s no defence, but they were giving away a pretty good sounding CD inside the paper on Saturday, and well, it’s only 60p… That’s no excuse. At least the paper was rubbish, but I still have to admit that I did it. Somehow I’d feel less guilty if I’d bought a porn mag or something.
Why this hatred of all things Daily Mail. Well frankly there is no moral justification for some of the things they’ve been doing recently.
1) Their campaign against the National Lottery Community Fund, and it’s chairwoman Lady Brittan. Frankly this campaign is racist. They’re selectively highlighting payments made to minority charities, while pointing out others that don’t get payments – the others tending to be ex-service charities and the like. They seem to object to overseas charities, and those that help the likes of asylum seekers. This has lead to Lady Britten being sent anti-semitic death threats. This is solely the responsibility of the Daily Mail and their publishers Associated Newspapers. There’s much talk of “charity begins at home” and the like, which somehow means that we don’t help others in countries where people are much much poorer than us. Asylum seekers are a cheap shot. We have lots of them, and they have a lot of publicity and are not popular. Yet are they being employed on the black market? Yes. Do we need people at all levels of society for it all to work? Yes. And why shouldn’t they seek a new life here, when in much of the former Yugoslavia, they face racism of far worse proportion.
2) They bought the rights to Jeffrey Archer’s latest opus. This is a man who is serving a prison sentence for perjury. He may not be profiting at the moment, but have no doubt he will. I don’t want to support a convicted felon in a financial manner.
3) They paid a South African woman for an interview when she alleged Sir Alex Ferguson assaulted her. The headlines showed that they believed her, even though the whole case was highly tendentious, and it has since been thrown out by South African police. I have no love for Fergie, but even I can see a malicious story when it’s thrown up.
Those are just the stories off the top of my head. Maybe another time, I’ll talk about how one of the most important regional evening papers has so diminished in recent years, not covering the stories Londoners care about…