Moonrakerz
This whole fixation people such as you have with the Daily Mail would actually be quite funny if it were not so serious.
Now there are a number of newspapers that I consider to be little more than toilet paper and thus I do not read them unless there is a very very specific reason to do so. This is not often.
Now we have yourself who is obviously a billious Daily Mail hater yet you read it :roll:
Why ?
You say you want to get a balanced view, yet it seems that everything it prints you deride, clearly evidenced by what you write.
For a newspaper that is so seemingly unpleasant it sells a considerable number of copies and continues to increase its sales over time whilst others lose sales. It is also a very difficult newspaper to buy after about 11am, in fact it is the only one the I regularly see to have sold out way before any other newspaper, and I travel around an awful lot so it is not a local thing.
Maybe they are all being bought by Daily Mail haters who need to get their daily fix ? I don't know, you tell me ?
So clearly there are several millions who read it find it acceptable, and indeed so did several members of the former Labour Government, including Gordon Brown, who along with a number of other Labour Cabinet Ministers was actually quite happy to publicly praise the quality of its journalism. Make of that what you will.
I also know that Alistair Campbell, and Tony Bliar were avid readers, and may still well be.
Now to me that would suggest that either several million people are wrong, or chaps such as yourself are outside of the majority, i.e. are in the minority.
You suggest I read the Grauniad. Now that IS an interesting paper. Insofar as hypocricy is concerned, in terms of its employment practices it equals if not outranks (something hard to do) the sheer and utter disdain that Labour has for the ordinary working man. Amazingly a newspaper that claims to be the beacon of Liberalism, operates employment practices that would make its own headlines were they practised by anyone other than a Leftist rag. Of course in the journey through Socialism that is OK because its in the "Cause".
Take another so called bastion of truth and free speech, the daily Mirror. This is the rag whose Labour supporting former MP owner used as his own private bank, and in doing so destroyed the pension rights of its employees. A number of its reporters still rush to his defence. Of course it is a Left Wing paper so a little detail like that does not matter as long as the battle against the Conservatives continues, and the disingenuous dribble, distortions and lies that it purveys are readily swallowed by its ever gullible readers. :roll: :roll: :roll:
It has also not only operated a share-tipping scam which enriched the reporters and the editor, but during the Miners Strike it ran a vicious, untrue and ultimately provable vendetta against Arthur Scargill with various untrue allegations made. Now I am no friend of Scargill but I find it stomach churning yet somehow so predictable that a Left Wing newspaper would operate in that manner.
You will thus see why I find it so strange that you come on here as part of a regular enclave, to criticise the Daily Mail. Your criticism being that it printed some akin to sensationalist (this being the ultimate intent in your wording and commentary in my opinion), yet ultimately admitting that it took the source from a local paper.
Newspapers are notorious for the inaccuracy of their reporting partly because they do not have the in depth knowledge and partly because their aim is to sell newspapers not report the truth - see comments above.
If you really want to rant about sensationalist media reporting then I suggest you need to take a closer look at some of the Leftist press, who will take any Railway accident and seek to make a political point out of it in a way that does not happen in the Right Wing press.
Of course with your wide range of reading you will already know this , which again makes your attack on the Daily Mail clearly driven by something other than the quality.
Years ago the Times would have been considered to have been a paper where one could get a balanced view but no longer.
More and more it seems that the balanced view comes from the Daily Telegraph, the Independent having become a poorly written (but at least orthographically accurate) illegitimate prodigy of the Grauniad, populated by economically obtuse journalists.
None of the above is a personal attack upon you by the way, you are free to live your life as you wish as far as I am concerned and hold whatever beliefs you want, but simply some observations as they appear to me.
