Continuing the ‘Daily Mail digested‘: a study of a string of Daily Mails from the new year finds crime is a staple, as an axe for the Mail to grind, to forever ask why more is not done (though politically, the Mail wants to pay for a state that does a minimum). There’s more to the Mail than that, writes Mark Rowe.
Another staple of journalism is celebrity; and if you can link crime and celebrity, so much the better, such as the December 29 story ‘How Holly’s old friend persuaded her to return to Dancing on Ice’, arising from ‘an alleged kidnap and murder plot’ (proceedings are active). It enabled the Mail to run two photos of the television presenter. Crime even makes it onto the sport pages; on December 30, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola had ‘told footballers to restrict their use of social media to limit the threat of attacks on their homes, after Jack Grealish’s family were forced to hit panic buttons’ during a burglary that included a police helicopter ‘patrolling the area’ (presumably not scope there for any Mail complaint about police not doing enough).
The Mail excels partly because it has reliably outstanding journalists, that it makes much of. Such as, in the Mail on Sunday (MoS), Tony Hetherington, ‘The Readers’ Champion’, a past speaker at London Fraud Forum annual conferences, who routinely features human interest stories that serve also as warnings to readers about unwise investments or outright scams, such as (in the MoS of December 31) the 88-year-old man who ‘parted with tens of thousands of pounds for artwork, following high pressure telephone calls from salesmen’. Hetherington (like others in the genre at other newspapers) worked to recover what money he could, besides highlight the wrong-doers (his email address is printed below his name – newspapers can make it surprisingly difficult for you to contact their reporters). On December 29, the Mail reported on the Dublin case of ‘Gangland hitman shot in the head with his own gun’, five days before. If the Mail had been slow over Christmas, it made up for it the next day when reporter Guy Adams delivered a roughly 2000-word article explaining the ‘brutal tit for tat feud’ – ‘the huge fortunes’ to be made ‘supplying cocaine in Dublin’. ”And that, in turn, has led to an explosion in violence between organised crime groups fighting for control of the streets.” Adams’ achievement is to gather such detail about crime that, naturally, is seldom visible, let alone advertised (the shooting happened at a steakhouse in Blanchardstown, about five minutes’ drive from the hotel where the Security TWENTY 24 exhibition ran in February).
Another double-page spread on January 8 combined exposure of crime with axe-grinding. The Mail’s US correspondent Tom Leonard wrote how ‘Sadiq Khan’s London has become a grisly reminder of New York’s bad old days’. It opens with ‘an anarchic spree of shameless law-breaking by thousands of people’, after the gates closed on the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland. A Transport for London (TfL) account first on the TfL intranet than online told of (illegal) vaping at the nearby Hyde Park Corner Underground station, fare evasion and in sum a ‘staggering level of criminal and anti-social behaviour’ and police allegedly leaving TfL staff on their own (perhaps the police didn’t know about the Winter Wonderland, or had bigger things to cover?!). Why was the Mail concentrating on the Underground, rather than the visitor attraction that brought about the crowd that felt emboldened to be lawless? Because TfL is run by the Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who faces an election in May, and whose rivals ‘are united in arguing that Khan is squarely to blame for the transport and policing crisis’, quoting the Lib Dem and Conservative candidates (but not Khan).
The Mail is ready to devote pages to issues beyond the day to day, such as ‘the nightmare vision depicted in Leave the World Behind, Netflix’s recent hit film starring Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke …. It’s fictional, but it touches on deep-seated, real-life fears’ as set out by the veteran journalist Edward Lucas, headlined ‘How will YOU survive on the day an enemy state SWITCHES OFF THE INTERNET’; the Mail doing well the journalistic trick of personalising what can seem too big to grasp. On January 2 the Mail led its front page on ‘First police probe into ‘virtual rape’, which included a side article on ‘the worrying rise of the metaverse’ and a commentary titled ‘I feel sympathy for the victim, but is this really a police matter?’. This took in big tech (Meta was quoted saying such behaviour had no place on its platform’), the law (a virtual crime is not a physical one, but might it fall under ‘harassment’?) and proving identity (how can a platform tell if a player has registered with fake ID), besides the VAWG (violence against women and girls) agenda.
