Shortly after the Olympics opening ceremony, the Daily Mail published a great steaming turd of an article by a "journalist" called Rick Dewsbury. I won't reproduce the whole sorry thing here, but suffice to say it was an unpleasant mix of contempt, misanthropy and thinly disguised racism. As he complained bitterly of the ceremony's "politically driven multiculturalism", Dewsbury observed: "This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up."
Every now and then the Daily Mail will publish an article that, even by its own dubious standards, is offensive to the point of unacceptable. Rick Dewsbury's journalistic offal is the latest in a long line of these: from Richard Littlejohn's declaration that the deaths of five women was "no great loss", to Samantha "don't hate me because I'm beautiful" Brick. But it's not the articles themselves that spark my curiosity; it's the liberal reaction to them, which judging by form seems to be: 1. Angrily share the article as much as possible. 2 ????? 3. Close the Daily Mail.
I've often wondered whether the Daily Mail's critics realise that the sole consequence of their actions is to increase traffic to its website, and whether next time they might consider cutting out the middle man by simply emptying the contents of their wallets on to Paul Dacre's desk. I posed this question to those responding to the Dewsbury article and the answer I got was that, despite increasing the paper's hit rate, it is nonetheless important to "expose" the Daily Mail. To which I ask, expose what? That a paper which once supported the Blackshirts is occasionally racist?
The blogger John Walker gave a more detailed answer. In a widely praised and shared article, he wrote:
"I still meet many people who do not understand how the Daily Mail is not just another tabloid, not just as bad as the rest of them, but instead something far more despicable and dangerous. It's one of the most popular papers in Britain, and when we say, 'Just ignore it – they're just trying to get hits,' I shudder. We do not ignore evil – we challenge it and get angry about it."
For me, this is where it all gets a bit ridiculous. The Daily Mail is not some kind of bigoted Sauron, casting a shadow over the citizens of middle England. There is no grand conspiracy; no ideological plan to make everyone that little bit worse. The Daily Mail is an amoral cash cow; one that knows its readers frighteningly well, and makes money by appealing to their very worst instincts. For all the sexism contained therein, as Kira Cochrane pointed out some months ago, the Daily Mail has more female bylines than any other newspaper – for the simple reason that the majority of its readers are female. In other words, this is a newspaper operating upon mercenary, not malevolent principles.
The editors of the Daily Mail don't think their readers are nice people; they think they're small-minded, curtain-twitching misers, largely because that's what the editors are like as well. As a Daily Mail journalist once put it to me, "There is no conspiracy with the Mail. It's just what you get when you have a newspaper run by [censored]."
But don't take my word for it: read Private Eye, which will tell you that the Mail's morning editorial conference is nicknamed "The Vagina Monologues" by staff, because of the liberty with which Paul Dacre dispenses the c-word. Or a New Yorker piece on the Mail, where journalist Lauren Collins asked picture editor Martin Clarke why he was publishing a picture of an acne-ridden actress. His response was not that he wished to ensure women's sexual and social oppression, but: "Well, we all just looked at the picture and went, 'Yuck, look, she's an actress in 90210, and she's spotty.'"
Now I am not suggesting that angry liberals should attempt to peacefully co-exist with the Daily Mail – far from it. I am arguing that said liberals should know their enemy. See, the fact is: the Daily Mail doesn't care that you're angry. It only cares that you buy it. And if the Daily Mail lives for profit, then the most effective way to keep it in check is to hit it in the wallet.
How do we do that? I hear you cry. Well luckily, there are plenty of precedents. In 2008, the residents of Hackney persuaded the borough's suppliers not to stock the Hackney Gazette unless it withdrew an advert in its pages for the BNP. The campaign worked and the Hackney Gazette agreed not to run the advert. And only last year, online activists persuaded advertisers in the News of the World to withdraw their custom after the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone, which in part led to the newspaper's closure.
So liberals, if you are serious about taking on the Daily Mail, stop clicking and start acting. And when you find yourselves getting fruitlessly angry the next time it publishes some swill, just remember the wisdom attributed to George Bernard Shaw: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
