Tag: The Daily Mail
The Daily Mail, And How An NHS Death Means… Racism Is Fine?
by John Walker on Jul.28, 2012, under The Rest
UPDATE UPDATE: The Mail has pulled the article entirely now. The link to it now just reaches an error page. But you can read the article in full via the links a few lines below, and via FreezePage here.
UPDATE: That was quick. About five minutes after I posted, the Mail’s story was ninja edited, without acknowledgement, to remove the most outrageously racist lines. Where once it read:
“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.
Almost, if not every, shot in the next sequence included an ethnic minority performer. The BBC presenter Hazel Irvine gushed about the importance of grime music (a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths) to east London. This multicultural equality agenda was so staged it was painful to watch.”
It now reads:
“This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but such set-ups are simply not the ‘norm’ in any part of the country. So why was it portrayed like this and given such prominence? If it was intended to be something that we can celebrate, that two people with different colour skin and different cultural heritages can live harmoniously together, then it deserves praise.
But what will be disturbing to many people is top-down political manipulation – whether consciously or unthinkingly – at a major sporting event.”
It’s the most extraordinary change to the text, completely reversing the meaning the author originally intended, and completely incongruous to the paragraphs either side of it, which still endorse Aidan Burley’s “leftie multicultural crap” tweet.
You can see scans of the original article, before these changes were made, here: 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Original: I am very aware that getting cross with Daily Mail articles is like shouting about how the sun can be hot. However, my motivation is not to cry, “How dare they!”, but instead to say, “Please understand that they do.” 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. We make more people aware. Some people reading won’t have realised. And others can maybe point someone this way when they ask what they’re getting so worked up about.
The particular piece that’s riled me this evening is elegantly titled, “The NHS did not deserve to be so disgracefully glorified in this bonanza of left-wing propaganda“. That the Mail would write a piece arguing that the NHS is a bad thing, and should have had no part in the Olympic opening ceremony, is not a surprise. They’re a vicious and spiteful paper, and their agenda against the poor and needy is over a hundred years old. The NHS is the antithesis of everything they stand for, a socialist blight on our nation they’d rather do without. And while there are a thousand reasons to get cross about that, it’s not the issue with this piece. The issue is what’s smuggled in there.