Daily Express

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''Daily Express''

Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Tabloid

Owner	Richard Desmond
Publisher	Northern and Shell Media
Editor	Peter Hill
Founded	1900
Political allegiance	Right-wing
Headquarters	10 Lower Thames Street, London EC3R 6EN
Circulation	833,145^[1]

Website: www.express.co.uk

For other uses, see Daily Express (disambiguation).

The Daily Express is a conservative, middle-market British tabloid newspaper. It is the flagship title of Express Newspapers and is currently owned by Richard Desmond. As of November 2006, it has a circulation of 774,665.^[1]

Express Newspapers publishes the Daily Express, Sunday Express (launched in 1918), Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday.

1 History
2 Desmond era
3 Criticisms
4 Editors
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] History

The Daily Express was founded in 1900 by Cyril Arthur Pearson, publisher of Pearson's Own and other titles. Pearson sold the title after losing his sight and it was bought in 1916 by the future Lord Beaverbrook. It was one of the first papers to carry gossip (an innovation by the Newspaper's editor, Frederic Salusbury), sports, and women's features, and the first newspaper in Britain to have a crossword. It moved in 1931 to 133 Fleet Street, a specially-commissioned art deco building. Under Beaverbrook the newspaper achieved a phenomenally high circulation, setting new records for newspaper sales several times throughout the 1930s.^[2] Its success was partly due to an aggressive marketing campaign and a vigorous circulation war with other populist newspapers. Beaverbrook also discovered and encouraged a gifted editor named Arthur Christiansen, who showed an uncommon gift for staying in touch with the interests of the reading public. The paper also featured Alfred Bestall's Rupert Bear cartoon and satirical cartoons by Carl Giles. An infamous front page headline of these years was "Judea Declares War on Germany", published on March 24, 1933.

The arrival of television and the public's changing interests took their toll on circulation, and following Beaverbrook's death in 1964, the paper's circulation declined for several years.^[2]

It switched from broadsheet to tabloid form in 1977 and was bought by United Newspapers in 1977. It was briefly renamed The Express in [[1996] and focused more on moral panic stories that actual news.^[2]

It moved from Fleet Street to Blackfriars Road in 1989 and was sold to publishing mogul Richard Desmond in 2000. In 2004 it moved to its present location on Lower Thames Street in the City of London.^[2]

[edit] Desmond era

In 2000, it was bought by Richard Desmond, publisher of a range of magazines including the celebrity magazine OK!. Controversy surrounded the acquisition because, at the time, Desmond also owned a selection of pornographic magazines such as Big Ones and Asian Babes (which led to him being nicknamed "Dirty Des" by Private Eye). He is still the owner of the most popular pornographic television channel in the UK, Television X. Desmond's purchase of the paper led to the departure of many staff including the then editor, Rosie Boycott, and columnist Peter Hitchens joined the Mail on Sunday. Boycott, despite her different politics, had an unlikely respect for Hitchens. Other stars of old Fleet Street, like the showbiz interviewer and feature writer Paul Callan, were brought in to restore some of the journalistic weight enjoyed by the paper in its heyday.

The Daily Express has for many years been a rival of the Daily Mail, and each frequently attacks the other's journalistic integrity. In the 1990s the Express had a less stridently right wing political stance than the Mail and, under editor Rosie Boycott, presented an agenda to the left of the Mail's. Since then, however, the paper has moved back considerably to the right. In the 2001 general election it supported the Labour Party, but in 2004 switched its support to the Conservative Party.^[3]

On October 31, 2005 UK Media Group Entertainment Rights secured majority interest from the Daily Express on Rupert Bear. They paid £6 million for a 66.6% control of the character. The Express Newspaper retains minority interest in Rupert Bear of 33.33% plus the right to publish Rupert Bear stories in certain Express publications.

The newspaper does not have a "newspaper of the year" banner on its front page, and instead has one saying the oddly more strident (and somewhat less probable) "The World's Greatest Newspaper", as well as the recent addition of "5 pence cheaper than the Daily Mail - and ten times better" due to recent price cuts.

[edit] Criticisms

[edit] "Diana Express"

The Daily Express has a reputation for consistently printing conspiracy theories based on the death of Princess Diana as front page news; this is often satirised in Private Eye and the newspaper is joked as being called the Diana Express^{[citation needed]} or the Di'ly Express.^[4] Even on July 7, 2006, the anniversary of the London bombings (used by most other newspapers to publish commemorations) the front page was given over to Diana. This tendency has also been satirised by the website Mailwatch^[5], which also satirises and discusses the Express in addition to the Daily Mail, and other newspapers.^[6] BBC News Online's Magazine Monitor has frequently noted that articles about Princess Diana are often printed on Mondays regardless of the existence of more pressing news.^[7]

The Daily Express devoted its front page to Diana on 46 occasions during 2006 alone ^[8]. For the week beginning August 27, 2006, the paper printed the "Diana Dossier" in which it claimed to ask all the questions related to the death. Diana was on the front page every day (except Sunday) that week.

[edit] "Real values"

In January 2006 the Daily Express introduced its new advertising tagline - "The paper that stands for real values and gives you real value for money". These "real values" include "traditions, progress, good manners, family fun".

These values have often manifested themselves, however, in nationalist ways, such as the post-July 7th headline, "Bombers are all spongeing asylum seekers" (which earned the Daily Express a substantial amount of negative attention from media watchdogs and other newspapers such as The Guardian). None of the bombers were asylum seekers, and at the time of writing, the identities of two of them were still unknown. The newspaper has also been criticised by the Press Complaints Commission for its repeated use of the self-contradictory term "illegal asylum seeker".^[9] The Express's obsession with the asylum issue even led to a member of the British National Party crediting the paper with boosting the BNP's electoral fortunes by focusing on the issue.^[10]

The paper has made such sweeping generalisations about numerous other targets, such as Tony Blair, the Labour Party and self-injurers (the paper published an ill-received editorial under the title "all self-harmers are tiresome attention seekers", in parody of the original asylum seeker heading, claiming that self-injurers are all teenagers who are looking for attention and should not be treated by the NHS). In addition, many of its articles have been considered homophobic.

[edit] "Non-newsworthy front pages"

The Daily Express often dedicates its front page to stories that would appear to rotate around several key themes including; house prices, food scares, miracle medical cures and the weather. These front pages are generally not based on a major news story of the day and are often sexed up with spurious headlines with little factual content to follow, for example 'The Secret Killer in our Food' - creating a front page headline about the dangers of hydrogenated vegetable oil in food or 'The Amazing Protein Diet' creating a front page headline about ketosis. Both such medical stories would appear to have been in the public domain in some form for several years making it hard to see how they could be worthy of newspaper front pages. House prices or inheritance tax stories also appear to be extremely popular, e.g.'House Prices to Rise by 50%'.

Other nicknames for the Daily Express include Daily Excess and Daily Sexpress, due to its ownership by Richard Desmond, and also its tendency to print a lot of pictures of attractive young women, especially murder victims, and a lot of sex-related "non-news" stories.