Should ‘The Daily Mail’ be banned under the Obscene Publications Act?

First topic message reminder :

The political columnist Owen Jones has described ‘The Daily Mail’ as an “almost farcically detestable rag”, while the American freelance writer Keith Kloor called it “a bastion of melodramatic and scurrilous journalism”. Some might see those as understatements. It’s been around since 1896, and it only took four years for it to begin to earn its reputation for showing scant regard for the truth or the consequences of what it prints. On that occasion, it was the false report of a massacre of Europeans during the Boxer Rebellion in China.
 
In 1919, 'The Daily Mail' said that as so many men had died, lots of single women should be deported lest they "spread lesbianism and adultery". In 1924 it swung a general election to the Tories by posting, four days before polling, the outrageous ‘Zinoviev letter’ which was later proved to be a forgery. In 1938, ‘The Daily Mail’ was printing horror stories about German Jewish refugees “pouring into this country”, pumping out the same vitriol that it reserves for asylum seekers nowadays. Only last spring, a column by Richard Littlejohn mocking transgender schoolteacher Lucy Meadows helped pile on bullying that sent her fleeing from her job, and it may have contributed to her suicide a few weeks later. Not surprisingly, over the years this so-called newspaper has been successfully sued by many people, including Alan Sugar, Diana Rigg and Elton John.
 
It’s been widely reported how ‘The Daily Mail’ printed an article accusing the late Ralph Miliband (a Jewish refugee who served in the British navy during World War Two) of “hating Britain”. Wasn’t that an obscenity? Stefan Stern writes: “The paper that protests loudest of all about the freedom of the press is relaxed about smearing the dead and attributing views to someone that he clearly did not hold. In one sense this is all a compliment to Ed Miliband. If he weren’t seen as a threat by the right, it is unlikely such excessive treatment would be handed out. But you suspect that even a lot of ‘Daily Mail’ readers will find this sort of spiteful behaviour hard to accept.” Of course ‘The Daily Mail’ “loves Britain” so much that its owner, who has a fortune of over a billion pounds, pays no tax here; the parent company, Rothermere Continuation Ltd, is registered in Bermuda.
 
Owen Jones develops Stern’s argument: “This stomach-churning attack on Ed Miliband’s father - and him by association - is a warning. The British right are preparing one of the most poisonous, vicious all-out wars against the left in post-war Britain. If this is how far into the gutter this wretched ‘newspaper’ is already willing to plunge, what’s it going to be like six months before the election? The logic of the campaign is three-fold. Firstly, the right believe that Ed Miliband has veered off script, abandoning the free market fundamentalist consensus established by Thatcherism in favour of what - by historical standards - is pretty mild social democracy. Secondly, the right-wing media barons who set the terms of what is deemed politically palatable in Britain have never forgiven Ed Miliband for his endorsement of Leveson, which they believe is an unacceptable threat to their power. Thirdly, they think Labour under Ed Miliband could actually win the 2015 election.”
 
Ed Miliband's father fought fascism, but ‘The Daily Mail’ supported it, both in this country (the paper’s owner wrote an article in January 1934 entitled 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' and praising Oswald Mosley), and also in Germany and Italy. Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the paper’s editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s. He predicted that "the minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany". In October 1938, he sent this telegram to Hitler: “My dear Fuhrer, everyone in England is profoundly moved by the bloodless solution to the Czechoslovakian problem. People not so much concerned with territorial readjustment as with dread of another war with its accompanying bloodbath. Frederick the Great was a great popular figure. I salute your Excellency’s star, which rises higher and higher.” Nothing much changes; in April 2012, ‘The Daily Mail’ was supporting the fascist Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election.
 
Don’t let’s pretend that we have a free press in this country. We have a bought press, owned by a handful of moguls who dictate the political slant of their papers, which is most cases is right-wing. ‘Freedom’ is not the same thing as ‘licence’, which is a more apt description of the irresponsible way in which ‘The Daily Mail’ operates. Jonathan Freedland commented in ‘The Guardian’: “There are plenty on the left who have long believed the Mail to be a dark, brooding presence in British public life, churning out its daily diet of going-to-the-dogs pessimism. Now many others will see why. For attacking Ed Miliband via his late father, that newspaper has revealed its ugliest face.” As Owen Jones says: “Anybody who wants to build a different sort of country - not a Britain treated as a plaything by wealthy barons who can’t even be bothered to pay tax - needs to stand against this poison.”  
 
Stefan Stern gives us reason to hope that the excessive influence of such gutter tabloids may be waning: “In a world of rapidly falling circulations, newspapers cannot afford to display contempt for accuracy and by extension contempt for their readers as well. The mainstream media, and especially the papers, are nothing like the force they were even five years ago. People get their news from a variety of sources, and then share and reinforce their views on uncontrollable social media.”
 
In the 1930s, ‘The Spectator’ condemned Lord Rothermere’s article supporting Mosley: “The Blackshirts, like ‘The Daily Mail’, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average ‘Daily Mail’ reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made. When Lord Rothermere tells his clientele to go and join the fascists some of them pretty certainly will.” Isn’t that an obscenity?
 
Wikipedia defines an obscenity as “any statement or act which strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time”. Hasn’t ‘The Daily Mail’ been posting such statements throughout its history? The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 says “an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.” Does ‘The Daily Mail’ corrupt the minds of those weak-willed souls who swallow the bile that it publishes, some of whom even go as far as regurgitating it on forums such as this one? Is it time that ‘The Daily Mail’ was banned?
 
Sources used:-
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail
 
http://labourlist.org/2013/10/the-daily-mail-is-a-scorpion-to-sting-is-its-nature/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LabourListLatestPosts+%28LabourList%29
 
http://owenjonesramblings.tumblr.com/post/62811986074/be-prepared-the-right-are-preparing-all-out-war
 
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/01/daily-mail-ed-miliband-father
 
http://www.legalweek.com/legal-week/blog-post/2136919/obscene-publications-acts
 
Further reference:-
 
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/09/milibands-defence-his-father-against-daily-mail-defining-moment
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2132611/French-elections-2012-Marine-Le-Pen-responsible-vote-France.html

Disambiguation: "Daily Mail"

see also "Litter"

How reading 'The Daily Mail' can damage your health.....  


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRIuiWNWwAAOsDQ.jpg

‘The Daily Mail’ at its worst – a desperate, filthy smear, written by Zac Goldsmith, in which the subliminal message is that all Muslims are either terrorists or terrorist sympathisers. There are no depths to which the Tories won’t sink nowadays as they endeavour to frighten people into voting for them.

“London stands on the brink of a catastrophe, the shockwaves from which would be felt across the country.” Accompanied by a photo of the bus blown up during the 7/7 bombings:-

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3567537/On-Thursday-really-going-hand-world-s-greatest-city-Labour-party-thinks-terrorists-friends-passionate-plea-ZAC-GOLDSMITH-four-days-Mayoral-election.html

Is Goldsmith being antisemitic?

Given all the hue and cry about 'Antisemitism' in the Labour party people seem to have forgotten what semitic means :

Semitic
sɪˈmɪtɪk/
adjective
adjective: Semitic
1.
relating to or denoting a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the main subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family.
2.
relating to the peoples who speak Semitic languages, especially Hebrew and Arabic.

The 'antisemitic' re-tweet was made in 2014 but has only come to light in the past couple of weeks, just when the London and Local elections started to become more prominent in the News and of course the media have been all over it since.

Goldsmith has been spouting his anti-Islamic hate speech for much longer but there has been not out cry or critical coverage.

Why? As if I really need to ask!!!!

From 'Private Eye':-


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_VkyBWAAQ1DXy.jpg

The Daily Mail is not even fit to line the bottom of a parrot's cage...

(m fark.com)

What have you got against parrots?

They are above me in the pecking order...

Of course Toby Young understands what life is like on benefits – he knows what ‘rings true’

From an article by Mark Steel:-

There’s a trick we play on ourselves in which we pretend that people who are struggling are fine really, so we shouldn’t feel too bad. Experts at this game will pass a beggar and say “I wouldn’t worry, he’s got a castle round the corner. I think he’s the Viscount of Northumberland”. If they pass one with no legs they’ll say: “He’s got loads of legs at home. He’s half crab. Don’t fall for that old trick”.

It’s exciting when someone takes this art to a new level, and the columnist/bloke-who-pops-up-on-telly Toby Young has put in a magnificent effort in ‘The Daily Mail’ with a review of the Ken Loach film ‘I, Daniel Blake’. This is a story of a man who had a heart attack but is denied disability benefit, and was made following studies of hundreds of cases. But Young isn’t intimidated by that. He derides it as inaccurate liberal nonsense, because “the two protagonists are a far cry from the scroungers on Channel 4’s ‘Benefits Street’”.

Exactly. It’s the same reason we shouldn’t take any notice of David Attenborough, with his misleading films about orangutans; the ones he shows are a far cry from the ones in ‘The Jungle Book’ that want to kidnap a child and learn to make fire.

He outlined his qualifications even further by saying, “I’m no expert but several aspects of 'I, Daniel Blake', don’t ring true”. This is why he’s quite reasonably become a spokesperson for Conservative ideas: he accepts he knows nothing about what happens on welfare, but isn’t afraid to insist he knows more about it than someone who spends their whole life in it, because he thought “that doesn’t ring true” while looking out of the window.

Read on......
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ken-loach-i-daniel-blake-toby-young-life-on-benefits-rings-true-mark-steel-a7383461.html

Stirring up hatred against members of the judiciary, when they are just doing their job and preventing our unelected dictator Theresa May from overruling the legislature, smacks of fascism. That sort of rhetoric got an MP murdered; why isn't this foul paper prosecuted for its hate crimes?


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwXwe6AXUAQsiCp.jpg

But what else would we expect from the Daily Mail - that champion of the rule of law ( when it suits them , of course)?

But one small piece of good news : the case brought by those petitioners to the High Court has clearly rattled Dacre's cage. More power to their elbow...

Isn't it amazing how 'The Daily Mail' will as good as sympathise with an under-occupying, unemployed council tenant - as long as he is a neo-Nazi terrorist?


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyBxNUPXEAAoJ5I.jpg

Fortunately the Judge was not influenced by such finely-drawn distinctions. I can't say whether that makes him an "Enemy of the People" however.

Can we imagine what the Mail's reaction would have been if the victim had been a precious Tory...?

Google "Airey Neave" for a precise answer.

The publishers of newspapers know exactly what their readers want to see in print.

It’s hard to imagine anyone with more than a single brain cell buying the cesspit of misinformation known as ‘The Daily Mail’, which has been peddling fake news since 1900.

Tony Blair attacks Daily Mail's 'hypocrisy' over suicide bomber

Extracts from an article by Jamie Grierson and Nazia Parveen:-

Tony Blair has denied that a Labour government paid compensation to the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who went on to blow himself up in Iraq, in a strongly worded statement in which he accused ‘The Daily Mail’ of hypocritical coverage over the Manchester-born jihadi’s death. The former PM said compensation, thought to amount to £1m, was paid out under the Conservative-led coalition government in 2010, and he criticised the tabloid for blaming him and Labour instead.

On 22 February, the paper’s front-page story was the death of Jamal al-Harith – who changed his name from Ronald Fiddler after converting to Islam in his 20s but most recently went by the nom de guerre Abu Zakariya al-Britani – in which Blair’s government was singled out for “intense lobbying” for his release. “It is correct that Jamal al-Harith was released from Guantánamo Bay at the request of the British government in 2004”, Blair said. “This followed a massive media and parliamentary campaign, led by ‘The Daily Mail’, the very paper that is now supposedly so outraged at his release, and strongly supported by the then Conservative opposition.” The former PM singled out a headline from ‘Mail Online’ entitled “Still think he wasn’t a danger, Mr Blair? Fury at Labour government’s £1m compensation for innocent Brit”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/22/british-suicide-bomber-ronald-fiddler-uk-security-services-guilty-of-failings-terrorism-chief

Secret of the Daily Mail's success is that it targets a readership of middle class middle aged women - regularly read it for years myself because, although I had little time for the news, the Mail had a crossword I could complete in my lunch hour, good TV pages and interesting lifestyle articles

The vile aspects get imbibed alongside the good, and you don't always notice straight away - fortunately, I was working in an occupation where xenophobic and judgemental attitudes soon get called out

I didn't imagine that targeting of Tony Blair for a few lies was likely to bother anyone, judging by the perpetual attacks on him hereabouts. He appears to be the recipient of blame for all Labour's current ills and anyone who raises any concern about the Opposition is usually instantly labelled a 'Blairite' with all the implications of that.

Surely the Daily Mail can't actually be worse than Toxic Tony to those who customarily decry all his works...

Phil Hornby at his mischievous best!  

Yes, I’ve criticised Tony Blair for not doing more to reverse 18 years of Tory ideology, especially as he won such massive majorities in 1997 and 2001. Yes, I’ve criticised him (as have millions of others) for getting close to Bush and involving us in Iraq, and even for having shady connections with the autocratic ruler of Azerbaijan. Yes, I think he was wrong to renege on a promise he made to Paddy Ashdown in 1997 on electoral reform - which could have spared us from the current Tory nightmare - but when you have a parliamentary majority of 179, why would you feel like compromising with other parties? However, I’ve also, on more than one occasion, given Blair credit for the minimum wage, the Good Friday Agreement and his government’s spending on health and education.

Anyone who seriously believes in fairness and justice for all won’t turn a blind eye to blatant lies being told about any individual. If we can’t criticise someone on just their record, and need to fabricate the evidence as ‘The Daily Mail’ does, it really would be time for us to pack up and move on. And although it was actually the Tories, and in particular Ken Clarke, who paid out up to £1 million in compensation to terrorist Ron Fiddler, I don’t criticise them for doing so. If the claim had gone to court, under the then prevailing rules of disclosure, contacts and even lives could have been put at risk.

Desmond Tutu once said: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”, and I never want to be on the side of ‘The Daily Mail’.

OK - the pseudo-socialist was a lovely fella. Not an Opportunist, not a Warmonger, not driven by a determination to become one of the filthy-rich, nor ever a sycophant to George dubbya Bush!

We're out of love with the incumbent Leader of the Labour Party, so just keep wringing those hands, folks. Because we're fresh out of useful ideas. Talk amongst yourselves until the next election.

Jonathan Freedland, writing in The Guardian, says
"Hammond's humiliation suggests May will never, ever allow herself to be on the wrong side of the Daily Mail ..."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/17/the-leave-fanatics-will-have-their-hard-brexit-and-if-the-price-is-the-union-so-be-it

It can only be a matter of days before the (free paper) Evening Standard becomes joined with the Mail in the public mind:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/style/im-not-sexy-i-wear-scrubs-all-the-time-says-university-challenge-contestant-dubbed-the-sexiest-ever/ar-BByzDDk?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=iehp

Amid the standard-issue Oxcamb nerd contestants on University Challenge, there is the occasional light relief from a female you might actually rather fancy.

But how does this constitute National News, ferchrissake?

What sells newspapers is the prejudice of readers.

Just when you think 'The Daily Mail' can't get any worse......


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9u4EhgXUAEfsN9.jpg

Mrs May wouldn't condemn that front page when asked to do so in Parliament, but that's hardly surprising:-

Theresa May held private dinner for Daily Mail editor at No 10

Paul Dacre was only media figure to get hospitality from PM in her first six months.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/30/paul-dacre-theresa-may-private-dinner-daily-mail-editor-no-10

If they think that photograph of the woman makes her look authoritative and imposing they had better think again. There seems to be something chilling about it to me - reminiscent, in fact, of Mary Bell, the notorious child strangler of the 1960s.

How appropriate is that...?

Meanwhile, back in 1962 ....

Ugly is the new beautiful

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_k0pEdXYAQf8CS.jpg

'The Daily Filth' behaving true to form. A police car taking Corbyn to Labour's manifesto launch ran over a cameraman's foot. So that gets twisted into Corbyn running over a BBC man's foot. 'The Sun' also did its bit for Rupert's lackey Theresa May, with its front page remark that "Jez runs over TV man".

A true democracy requires an informed electorate, not a constantly misinformed one. 'The Daily Mail' invented fake news long before Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

The strap-line heading above the title puts it all in perspective:
Tantalising new clues in hunt for lamb who eloped with sheepdog.

"No comment" as we often say.

Just when you think 'The Daily Mail' couldn't sink any further into the sewer.......  


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAhNw_HXgAIwjrs.jpg

Incidentally, on 26 November 2013 Jeremy Corbyn received the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Award at Portcullis House, in recognition of thirty years of trying to persuade violent groups to lay down their arms. Don’t expect to read that fact in ‘The Daily Mail’ any time soon.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDp3k2_XgAAA8h8.jpg

Presumably this 'Mail' error was not deliberate for once. The photo is of Barry Cryer, who is 82 years old and very much alive.