Daily Mail

Daily Mail

Daily Mail front page in August 2010.
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Tabloid
Owner(s)	Daily Mail and General Trust
Publisher	DMG Media
Editor	Paul Dacre
Founded	May 4, 1896 (1896-05-04)
Political alignment	Conservative
Language	English
Circulation	1,708,006[1] (as of March 2014)
ISSN	0307-7578
OCLC number	16310567
Website	www.dailymail.co.uk

The Daily Mail is a British daily conservative, middle-market^[2][3] tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust.^[4]

First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun.^[5] Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. The Daily Mail was Britain's first daily newspaper aimed at the newly-literate "lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks",^[6] and was the first British paper to sell a million copies a day.^[7]

It was at the outset a newspaper for women, the first to provide features especially for them,^[8][9] and as of the second-half of 2013 had a 54.77% female readership,^[1] the only British newspaper whose female readers constitute more than 50% of its demographic.^[10][11]

It had an average daily circulation of 1,708,006 copies in March 2014.^[1] Between July and December 2013 it had an average daily readership of approximately 3.951 million, of whom approximately 2.503 million were in the ABC1 demographic and 1.448 million in the C2DE demographic.^[12] Its website has more than 100 million unique visitors per month.^[13]

The paper has been criticised by doctors and scientists for its sensationalist reporting on medical subjects,^[14] by at least one of its former journalists as racist,^[15] and as racist by several other newspapers with respect to its coverage of the European refugee crisis.

Overview

The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format^[16] on 3 May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding. On this date it also absorbed the Daily Sketch, which had been published as a tabloid by the same company. The publisher of the Mail, the Daily Mail and General Trust, is currently a FTSE 250 company and the paper has a circulation of around two million which is the fourth-largest circulation of any English language daily newspaper in the world.^[17]

Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in March 2014 show gross daily sales of 1,708,006 for the Daily Mail.^[1] According to a December 2004 survey, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats.^[18] The main concern of Viscount Rothermere, the current chairman and main shareholder, is that the circulation be maintained. He testified before a House of Lords select committee that "we need to allow editors the freedom to edit", and therefore the newspaper's editor was free to decide editorial policy, including its political allegiance.^[19] The Mail has been edited by Paul Dacre since 1992.

History

Early history

The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies but the print run on the first day was 397,215 and additional printing facilities had to be acquired to sustain a circulation which rose to 500,000 in 1899. Lord Salisbury, 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, dismissed the Daily Mail as "a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys."^[20] By 1902, at the end of the Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world.^[21][22]

With Harold running the business side of the operation and Alfred as Editor, the Mail from the start adopted an imperialist political stance, taking a patriotic line in the Second Boer War, leading to claims that it was not reporting the issues of the day objectively.^[23] From the beginning, the Mail also set out to entertain its readers with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions (which were also the main means by which the Harmsworths promoted the paper).

In 1900 the Daily Mail began printing simultaneously in both Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to do so (in 1899, the Daily Mail had organised special trains to bring the London-printed papers north). The same production method was adopted in 1909 by the Daily Sketch, in 1927 by the Daily Express and eventually by virtually all the other national newspapers. Printing of the Scottish Daily Mail was switched from Edinburgh to the Deansgate plant in Manchester in 1968 and, for a while, The People was also printed on the Mail presses in Deansgate. In 1987, printing at Deansgate ended and the northern editions were thereafter printed at other Associated Newspapers plants.

In 1906 the paper offered £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel and £10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester. Punch magazine thought the idea preposterous and offered £10,000 for the first flight to Mars, but by 1910 both the Mail's prizes had been won. (For full list see Daily Mail aviation prizes.)

The paper was accused of warmongering before the outbreak of World War I, when it reported that Germany was planning to crush the British Empire. Northcliffe created controversy by advocating conscription when the war broke out.^[24] On 21 May 1915 Northcliffe wrote a blistering attack on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Kitchener was considered a national hero, and overnight the paper's circulation dropped from 1,386,000 to 238,000. Fifteen hundred members of the London Stock Exchange ceremonially burned the unsold copies and launched a boycott against the Harmsworth Press. Prime Minister H. H. Asquith accused the paper of being disloyal to the country.

When Kitchener died, the Mail reported it as a great stroke of luck for the British Empire. The paper then campaigned against Asquith, who resigned on 5 December 1916.^[25] His successor David Lloyd George asked Northcliffe to be in his cabinet, hoping it would prevent him from criticising the government. Northcliffe declined.^[26]

Inter-war period

Before 1930

As Lord Northcliffe aged, his grip on the paper slackened and he might have nothing to do with it for months at a time. But light-hearted stunts might enliven him, such as the Hat campaign in the winter of 1920. This was a contest with a prize of £100 for a new design of hat—a subject in which Northcliffe took a particular interest. There were 40,000 entries and the winner was a cross between a top hat and a bowler christened the Daily Mail Sandringham Hat. The paper subsequently promoted the wearing of it but without much success.^[27] In 1922, when Lord Northcliffe died, Lord Rothermere took full control of the paper.

In 1919 Alcock and Brown made the first flight across the Atlantic, winning a prize of £10,000 from the Daily Mail. In 1930 the Mail made a great story of another aviation stunt, awarding another prize of £10,000 to Amy Johnson for making the first solo flight from England to Australia.^[28]

The Daily Mail had begun the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1908. At first, Northcliffe had disdained this as a publicity stunt to sell advertising and he refused to attend. But his wife exerted pressure upon him and he changed his view, becoming more supportive. By 1922 the editorial side of the paper was fully engaged in promoting the benefits of modern appliances and technology to free its female readers from the drudgery of housework.^[29] The Mail maintained the event until selling it to Media 10 in 2009.^[30]

On 25 October 1924 the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter, which indicated that British Communists were planning violent revolution. This was thought by some a significant factor in the defeat of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party in the 1924 general election, held four days later.^[31]

From 1923 Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail formed an alliance with the other great press baron, Lord Beaverbrook. Their opponent was the Conservative Party politician and leader Stanley Baldwin. By 1929 George Ward Price was writing in the Mail that Baldwin should be deposed and Beaverbrook elected as leader. In early 1930 the two Lords launched the United Empire Party which the Daily Mail supported enthusiastically.

The rise of the new party dominated the newspaper and, even though Beaverbrook soon withdrew, Rothermere continued to campaign. Vice Admiral Ernest Augustus Taylor fought the first by-election for the United Empire Party in October, defeating the official Conservative candidate by 941 votes. Baldwin's position was now in doubt, but in 1931 Duff Cooper won the key by-election at St George's, Westminster, beating the United Empire Party candidate, Sir Ernest Petter, supported by Rothermere, and this broke the political power of the press barons.^[32]

In 1927, the celebrated picture of the year Morning by Dod Procter was bought by the Daily Mail for the Tate Gallery.^[33]

Rise of fascism

Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail's editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s.^[34][35] Rothermere's 1933 leader "Youth Triumphant" praised the new Nazi regime's accomplishments, and was subsequently used as propaganda by them.^[36] In it, Rothermere predicted that "The minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany". Journalist John Simpson, in a book on journalism, suggested that Rothermere was referring to the violence against Jews and Communists rather than the detention of political prisoners.^[37]

Rothermere and the Mail were also editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.^[38] Rothermere wrote an article titled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in January 1934, praising Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine",^[39] and pointing out that: "Young men may join the British Union of Fascists by writing to the Headquarters, King's Road, Chelsea, London, S.W."^[40]

The Spectator condemned Rothermere's article commenting that, "..the Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking. The average Daily Mail reader is a potential Blackshirt ready made. When Lord Rothermere tells his clientele to go and join the Fascists some of them pretty certainly will."^[41]

The paper's support ended after violence at a BUF rally in Kensington Olympia later that year.^[42] Mosley and many others thought Rothermere had responded to pressure from Jewish businessmen who it was believed had threatened to stop advertising in the paper if it continued to back an anti-Semitic party.^[43] The paper nonetheless continued to oppose the arrival of Jewish refugees escaping Germany, describing their arrival as "a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed."^[44]

Post-war history

On 5 May 1946 the Daily Mail celebrated its Golden Jubilee. Winston Churchill was the chief guest at the banquet and toasted it with a speech:^[45]

In reply, Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere had something to say about the newsprint shortages at that time for, while the Mail of 1896 was eight pages, the Mail of 1946 was reduced to just four.^[45]

The Daily Mail was transformed by its editor during the 1970s and 1980s, David English. He had been editor of the Daily Sketch from 1969 to 1971, when it closed. Part of the same group from 1953, the Sketch was absorbed by its sister title, and English became editor of the Mail, a post in which he remained for more than 20 years.^[46] English transformed it from a struggling newspaper selling half as many copies as its mid-market rival, the Daily Express, to a formidable publication, whose circulation rose to surpass that of the Express by the mid-1980s.^[47] English was knighted in 1982.^[48]

The paper enjoyed a period of journalistic success in the 1980s, employing some of the most inventive writers in old Fleet Street including the gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, Lynda Lee-Potter and sportswriter Ian Wooldridge (who unlike some of his colleagues—the paper generally did not support sporting boycotts of white-minority-ruled South Africa—strongly opposed apartheid). In 1982 a Sunday title, the Mail on Sunday, was launched (the Scottish Sunday Mail, now owned by the Mirror Group, was founded in 1919 by the first Lord Rothermere, but later sold.)^[49]

Sir David English became editor-in-chief and chairman of Associated Newspapers in 1992 after Rupert Murdoch had attempted to hire Evening Standard editor Paul Dacre as editor of The Times, The Evening Standard was then part of the same group, and Dacre was appointed to succeed English as a means of dealing with Murdoch's offer.^[50] Dacre remains the editor of the Daily Mail and subsequently became editor-in-chief of the group after English died.

In late 2013 the paper moved its London printing operation from the city's Docklands area to a new £50 million plant in Thurrock, Essex.^[51] There are Scottish editions of both the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, with different articles and columnists.

Scottish, Irish, Continental and Indian editions

Scottish Daily Mail

The Scottish Daily Mail was published as a separate title from Edinburgh^[52] starting in December 1946. The circulation was poor though, falling to below 100,000 and the operation was rebased to Manchester in December 1968.^[53] In 1995 the Scottish Daily Mail was relaunched, and is printed in Glasgow. With a circulation in December 2009 of 113,771, it has the third-highest daily newspaper sales in Scotland.^[54]

Irish Daily Mail

The Daily Mail officially entered the Irish market with the launch of a local version of the paper on 6 February 2006; free copies of the paper were distributed on that day in some locations to publicise the launch. Its masthead differed from that of UK versions by having a green rectangle with the word "IRISH", instead of the Royal Arms, but this was later changed, with "Irish Daily Mail" displayed instead. The Irish version includes stories of Irish interest alongside content from the UK version. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Irish edition had a circulation of 63,511 for July 2007,^[55] falling to an average of 49,090 for the second half of 2009.^[56] Since 24 September 2006 Ireland on Sunday, the Irish Sunday newspaper acquired by Associated in 2001, was replaced by an Irish edition of the Mail on Sunday (the Irish Mail on Sunday), to tie in with the weekday newspaper.

Continental and Overseas Daily Mail

Two foreign editions were begun in 1904 and 1905; the former titled the Overseas Daily Mail, covering the world, and the latter titled the Continental Daily Mail, covering Europe and North Africa.^[57]

Mail Today

The newspaper entered India on 16 November 2007 with the launch of Mail Today,^[58] a 48-page compact size newspaper printed in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida with a print run of 110,000 copies. Based around a subscription model, the newspaper has the same fonts and feel as the Daily Mail and was set up with investment from Associated Newspapers and editorial assistance from the Daily Mail newsroom.^[59]

Editorial stance

In the late 1960s, the paper went through a phase of being liberal on social issues like corporal punishment, but soon returned to a conservative line. The Mail has traditionally been a supporter of the Conservatives and has endorsed this party in all recent general elections. While the paper retained its support for the Conservative Party at the 2015 general election, the paper urged conservatively inclined voters to support UKIP in the constituencies of Heywood and Middleton, Dudley North and Great Grimsby where UKIP was the main challenger to the Labour Party.^[60]

The paper is generally critical of the BBC, which it says is biased to the left.^[61] The Mail has also opposed the growing of genetically modified crops in the United Kingdom.^[62]

On international affairs, the Mail broke with the establishment media consensus over the 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia. The Mail accused the British government of dragging Britain into an unnecessary confrontation with Russia and of hypocrisy regarding its protests over Russian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence, citing the British government's own recognition of Kosovo's independence from Russia's ally Serbia.^[63]

Melanie Phillips, once known for her journalism at The Guardian, moved to the right in the 1990s and wrote for the Daily Mail, covering political and social issues from a conservative perspective. She has defined herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".^[64] Phillips' Monday column in the Mail ended in September 2013.^[65]

The Mail's science journalism often follows a strategy of attention-grabbing headlines, often reporting on small studies of limited value for research.^[66] In 2010, physician Ben Goldacre commented that its health reporting was an "ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into ones that either cause or prevent cancer."^[67]

Awards

Received

The Daily Mail has been awarded the National Newspaper of the Year in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2012 by the British Press Awards^[68]

Daily Mail journalists have won a range of British Press Awards, including:

• "Campaign of the Year" (Murder of Stephen Lawrence, 2012)
• "Website of the Year" (Mail Online, 2012)
• "News Team of the Year" (Daily Mail, 2012)
• "Critic of the Year" (Quentin Letts, 2010)^[69]
• "Political Journalist of the Year" (Quentin Letts, 2009)
• "Specialist Journalist of the Year" (Stephen Wright, 2009)^[70]
• "Showbiz Reporter of the Year" (Benn Todd, 2012)
• "Feature Writer of the Year - Popular" (David Jones, 2012)
• "Columnist of the Year - Popular" (Craig Brown, 2012)
• "Best of Humour" - (Craig Brown, 2012)
• "Columnist - Popular" (Craig Brown, 2012)
• "Sports Reporter of the Year" (Jeff Powell, 2005)
• "Sports Photographer of the Year" (Mike Egerton, 2012; Andy Hooper, 2010, 2008)

Other awards include:

• "Orwell Prize" (Toby Harnden, 2012)
• "Hugh Cudlipp Award" (2012; Stephen Wright/Richard Pendlebury, 2009; 2007)^[71]

Notable stories

Holes in the road

On 17 January 1967, the Mail published a story, "The holes in our roads", about potholes, giving the examples of Blackburn where it said there were 4,000 holes. This detail was then immortalised by John Lennon in The Beatles song "A Day in the Life", along with an account of the death of 21-year-old socialite Tara Browne in a car crash on 18 December 1966, which also appeared in the same issue.^[72]

Unification Church

In 1981, the Daily Mail ran an investigation into the Unification Church, nicknamed the Moonies, and branded them a church that ends marriages in an article which also accused them of brainwashing converts.^[47] The Unification Church, which always denied brainwashing, sued for libel and lost heavily. A jury awarded the Mail a record-breaking £750,000—then the biggest libel payout. In 1983 the paper won a special British Press Award for a "relentless campaign against the malignant practices of the Unification Church."^[73]

Gay gene controversy

On 16 July 1993 the Mail ran the headline "Abortion hope after 'gay genes' finding";^[74][75] this headline has been widely criticised in subsequent years, for example as "perhaps the most infamous and disturbing headline of all" (of headlines from tabloid newspapers commenting on the Xq28 gene).^[76]

Stephen Lawrence

The Mail campaigned on the case of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in Eltham, London in April 1993. On 14 February 1997, the Mail led its front page with a picture of the five men accused of Lawrence's murder and the headline "MURDERERS", stating that it believed that the men had murdered Lawrence and adding "if we are wrong, let them sue us".^[77] This attracted praise from Paul Foot and Peter Preston.^[78] Other journalists criticised the Mail's coverage, contending that it was very late to change its stance on the reporting surrounding Lawrence's murder, with the newspaper's earlier focus being the alleged opportunistic behaviour of anti-racist groups ("How Race Militants Hijacked a Tragedy", 10 May 1993) with very little coverage of the case (20 articles in three years).^[79][80]

Jan Moir

A 16 October 2009 Jan Moir article which criticised aspects of the life and death of Stephen Gately, published six days after his death and before his funeral, the content and/or timing of which many people felt was inaccurate, insensitive, and homophobic, generated over 25,000 complaints, the highest number of complaints for a newspaper article in the history of the Press Complaints Commission.^[81][82] Major advertisers such as Marks & Spencer responded to the criticism by asking for their own adverts to be removed from the Mail Online webpage around Moir's article. The Daily Mail removed all display ads from the webpage with the Gately column.^[83]

Cannabis use

On 13 June 2011, a study by Dr Matt Jones and Michal Kucewicz^[84] on the effects of cannabinoid receptor activation in the brain was published in The Journal of Neuroscience^[84][85][86] and the British medical journal The Lancet.^[87] The study was used in articles by CBS News,^[88] and Le Figaro,^[89] Bild^[90] among others.

In October 2011, the Daily Mail printed an article citing the research, titled "Just ONE cannabis joint can bring on schizophrenia as well as damaging memory." UK political party Cannabis Law Reform (CLEAR), which campaigns for ending drug prohibition, criticised the Daily Mail,^[91] and contacted Dr Matt Jones, author of the study, who said he was "disappointed but not surprised" at the Daily Mail's reporting, and clarified: "This study does NOT say that one spliff will bring on schizophrenia".^[91] Dorothy Bishop, professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, in her blog awarded the Daily Mail the "Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation",^[14][92][93] calling the Daily Mail's article "the worst misrepresentation of a scientific article in a national newspaper."^[94] The Daily Mail was the sole nominee for the award, with Bishop commenting: "I'm pleased not to have had more nominations this year: it suggests that, despite all the grumblings about science journalism, the field is in rude health." The Mail later changed the article's headline to: "Just ONE cannabis joint 'can cause psychiatric episodes similar to schizophrenia' as well as damaging memory."^[95]

Samantha Brick

On 3 April 2012, the freelance journalist Samantha Brick wrote an article on the Daily Mail website titled "'There are downsides to looking this pretty': Why women hate me for being beautiful".^[96] The article went viral on social media websites and Brick trended globally on Twitter.^[97]

Ralph Miliband controversy

In September 2013, the Mail was criticised for an article on Ralph Miliband (father of then Labour-leader Ed Miliband and prominent Marxist sociologist), titled "The Man Who Hated Britain".^[98] Ed Miliband expressed anger at the allegations, saying that he was "appalled" and "not willing to see my father's good name be undermined in this way", as well as describing the article as "ludicrously untrue". Ralph Miliband had arrived in the UK from Belgium as a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. The Jewish Chronicle described the article as based on antisemitic writing from the 1930s, calling it "a revival of the 'Jews can't be trusted because of their divided loyalties' genre of antisemitism."^[99] Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith also linked the article to the Nazi sympathies of Viscount Rothermere, whose family remain the paper's owners.^{[100][101][102]}

The paper defended the article's general content in an editorial, but described its use of a picture of Ralph Miliband's grave as an "error of judgement".^[103] In the editorial, the paper further remarked that "We do not maintain, like the jealous God of Deuteronomy, that the iniquity of the fathers should be visited on the sons. But when a son with prime ministerial ambitions swallows his father's teachings, as the younger Miliband appears to have done, the case is different."^[104] A spokesman for the paper also described claims that the article continued its history of anti-Semitism as "absolutely spurious."^[105] However, the reference to "the jealous God of Deuteronomy" was criticised by Jonathan Freedland, who said that "In the context of a piece about a foreign-born Jew, [the remark] felt like a subtle, if not subterranean hint to the reader, a reminder of the ineradicable alienness of this biblically vengeful people"^[106] and that "those ready to acquit the Mail because there was no bald, outright statement of antisemitism were probably using the wrong measure."^[107]

Gawker Media lawsuit

In March 2015, James King, a former contract worker at the Mail's New York office, wrote an article for Gawker titled 'My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online'. In the article, King alleged that the Mail's approach was to rewrite stories from other news outlets with minimal credit in order to gain advertising clicks, and that staffers had published material they knew to be false. He also suggested that the paper preferred to delete stories from its website without correction rather than publish corrections or admit mistakes.^[108] In September 2015, the Mail's US company Mail Media filed a lawsuit against King and Gawker Media for libel.^[109] Eric Wemple at the Washington Post questioned the value of the lawsuit, noting that "Whatever the merits of King's story, it didn't exactly upend conventional wisdom" about the website's strategy.^[110]

Anti-refugee cartoon

Following the November 2015 Paris attacks whereby 129 people were killed and more than 300 injured after a multiple attackers opened fire and detonated suicide vests in the French capital,^[112] a cartoon in the Daily Mail by Stanley McMurtry ("Mac") linked the European migrant crisis (with a focus on Syria in particular^[113]) in with these terrorist attacks, criticising the European Union immigration laws for allowing Islamist radicals to gain easy access into the United Kingdom, among their feet small rodents heading in the same direction.^[114] Despite condemnations as being similar to Nazi propaganda by The New York Times,^[115] "reckless xenophobia," racist, the cartoon received praise on the Mail Online website.^[116] A Daily Mail spokesperson told The Independent: "We are not going to dignify these absurd comments which wilfully misrepresent this cartoon apart from to say that we have not received a single complaint from any reader".^[112]

Libel lawsuits

Successful lawsuits against the Mail

• 2001, February: Businessman Alan Sugar was awarded £100,000 in damages following a story commenting on his stewardship of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.^[117]
• 2003, October: Actress Diana Rigg awarded £30,000 in damages over a story commenting on aspects of her personality.^[118]
• 2006, May: £100,000 damages for Elton John, following false accusations concerning his manners and behaviour.^[119]
• 2009, January: £30,000 award to Dr Austen Ivereigh, who had worked for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, following false accusations made by the newspaper concerning abortion.^[120]
• 2010, July: £47,500 award to Parameswaran Subramanyam for falsely claiming that he secretly sustained himself with hamburgers during a 23-day hunger strike in Parliament Square to draw attention to the protests against the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009.^[121]
• 2011, November: the former lifestyle adviser Carole Caplin received damages over claims in the Mail that she would reveal intimate details about former clients.^[122]
• 2014, May: author J. K. Rowling received substantial damages and the Mail printed an apology. The newspaper had made a false claim about Rowling's story written for the website of Gingerbread, a single parents' charity.^[123]

Unsuccessful lawsuits

• 1981, April: The Daily Mail won £750,000 from the Unification Church, which had sued for libel due to articles about the Church's recruitment methods. Margaret Singer, professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, Berkeley, testified that the Mail's accounts of these methods were accurate. The case lasted over five months, one of Britain's longest civil lawsuits.^[124]
• 2012, February: Nathaniel Philip Rothschild lost his libel case against the Daily Mail, after the High Court agreed that he was indeed the "Puppet Master" for Peter Mandelson, that his conduct had been "inappropriate in a number of respects" and that the words used by the Daily Mail were "substantially true".^[125][126]
• 2012, May: Carina Trimingham, the partner of former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne, was ordered to pay more than £400,000 after she lost her High Court claims for damages for alleged breach of privacy and harassment against the Daily Mail.^[127] Huhne, whilst married, had an affair with Trimingham - who herself was in a lesbian civil partnership - and then later left his wife Vicky Pryce for Trimingham. This and a series of other events involving Pryce and Huhne led to his resignation from the Cabinet, and to both of them being arrested for perverting the course of justice and the criminal prosecution R v Huhne and Pryce.^[128]

Criticism

Racism

The New Yorker published an article about the Daily Mail, criticising its content and culture.^[15] In the article Brendan Montague, a former Mail reporter stated that "None of the front-line reporters I worked with were racist, but there’s institutional racism [at Daily Mail]. ”^[15]

Ellie Mae O'Hagan, writing for The Guardian, commented that the Daily Mail editorial staff are "small-minded, curtain-twitching misers", and that the tabloid publishes misanthropic and racist views.^[129]

Other criticisms

The Daily Mail's reporting about the activities of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge has been described as "cruel and childish" by the media commentator Roy Greenslade.^[130]

Djaffer Ait Aoudia told The Guardian that his own secretly-recorded film of the Mail's negotiations with a café owner negotiating a price for the CCTV recording from the café showed a person talking about the need for a "hacker" to obtain that footage of the November 2015 Paris attacks. The final agreed price with the café owner was €50,000. The Daily Mail responded: "There is nothing controversial about the Mail's acquisition of this video, a copy of which the police already had in their possession." The Guardian also, briefly, embedded the footage on their own website before removing it.^[131]

Supplements and features

Daily Mail City & Finance: City & Finance is the business part of the Daily Mail, and the Financial Mail is the business paper free with the Mail on Sunday. City & Finance features City News and the results from the London Stock Exchange, and also has its own website called This is Money.[132] Travelmail: Contains travel articles, advertisements etc. Femail: Femail is an extensive part of the Daily Mail's newspaper and website, being one of four main features on Mail Online others being News, TV & Showbiz and Sport. It is designed for women. Weekend: The Daily Mail Weekend is a TV guide published by the Daily Mail, included free with the Mail every Saturday. Weekend magazine, launched in October 1993, is issued free with the Saturday Daily Mail. The guide does not use a magazine-type layout but chooses a newspaper style similar to the Daily Mail itself. In April 2007, the Weekend had a major revamp. A feature changed during the revamp was a dedicated Freeview channel page.

Mail on Sunday Financial Mail on Sunday: now part of the main paper, this section includes the Financial Mail Enterprise, focusing on small business. You: You magazine is a women's magazine featured in the Mail on Sunday. It is a mix of in-depth features plus fashion, beauty advice, practical insights on health and relationships, food recipes and interiors. The Mail markets it, with Live magazine, as the only paper to have a magazine for him (Live) and for her (You). The Mail on Sunday is read by over six million a week.[133] Mail on Sunday 2: This pullout includes review, featuring articles on the arts, books and culture and it consists of reviews of all media and entertainment forms and interviews with sector personalities, property, travel and health. Football Mail on Sunday: this reviews Premier League, Championship and Football League games from Saturday as well certain international games.

Regular cartoon strips

• Garfield
• I Don't Believe It (discontinued)
• Odd Streak
• The Strip Show
• Chloe and Co. (by Knight Features)
• Up and Running (by Knight Features)
• The Gambols (Sunday, in the Cartoons section)
• Fred Basset
• Peanuts (Sunday, in the Cartoons section)

Up and Running is a strip distributed by Knight Features and Fred Basset has followed the life of the dog of the same name in a two-part strip in the Daily Mail since 8 July 1963.^[134] The Gambols are another feature in the Mail on Sunday.

The long-running Teddy Tail cartoon strip, was first published on 5 April 1915 and was the first cartoon strip in a British newspaper.^[135] It ran for over 40 years to 1960, spawning the Teddy Tail League Children's Club and many annuals from 1934 to 1942 and again from 1949 to 1962. Teddy Tail was a mouse, with friends Kitty Puss (a cat), Douglas Duck and Dr. Beetle. Teddy Tail is always shown with a knot in his tail.^[136][137]

Year Book

The Daily Mail Year Book first appeared in 1901, summarizing the news of the past year in one volume of 200-400 pages. Among its editors were Percy L. Parker (1901–1905), David Williamson (1914–1951), G. B. Newman (1955–1977), Mary Jenkins (1978–1986), P.J. Failes (1987), and Michael and Caroline Fluskey (1991).

Online media

The majority of content appearing in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday printed newspapers also forms part of that included in the MailOnline website. MailOnline is free to read and funded by advertising. In 2011 MailOnline was the second most visited English-language newspaper website worldwide.^[138][139] It has since then become the most visited newspaper website in the world,^[140] with over 189.5 million visitors per month, and 11.7 million visitors daily, as of January 2014.^[141]

Thailand's military junta blocked the UK's MailOnline in May 2014 after the site revealed a video of Thailand's Crown Prince and his wife, Princess Srirasmi, partying.The video appears to show the allegedly topless princess, a former waitress, in a tiny G-string as she feeds her pet dog cake to celebrate its birthday.^[142]

Contributors

Notable regular contributors (present)

Journalists

Baz Bamigboye David Blunkett MP Craig Brown Alex Brummer Jamie Carragher Ross Clark Stephen Glover Ephraim Hardcastle Sir Max Hastings Roy Hattersley Simon Heffer

Val Hennessy Liz Jones Dominic Lawson Ann Leslie Quentin Letts Richard Littlejohn Edward Lucas Peter McKay Jan Moir Bel Mooney Andrew Pierce

Amanda Platell Graham Poll Martin Samuel Sebastian Shakespeare Janet Street-Porter Ruth Sunderland Norman Tebbit Tom Utley Sarah Vine Brian Viner Stephen Wright[143]

Cartoonists Dave Colton Alex Graham Stanley McMurtry Photographers Dave Parker Mark Richards Jamie Wiseman

Past writers

• Paul Callan
• William Comyns Beaumont (left in 1903 to create The Bystander)
• Anthony Cave Brown (worked from mid-1950s to mid-1960s, won "Reporter of the Year" award in 1958)
• Vernon Bartlett MP
• Nigel Dempster
• Daniel Farson
• Percy Izzard Gardening and country life correspondent for over 50 years.
• Stephen Leather Author of Thriller Novels.
• Lt Cdr Ralph Izzard (Writer for the Mail beginning in 1931 and continued contributing until his death in 1992, with the only interruption being his service in British Naval Intelligence during WWII.)
• Paul Johnson (left the Mail in 2001)
• Sir John Junor
• Lynda Lee-Potter (wrote for the Mail from 1967 until her death in 2004)
• William Le Queux
• Michael Morris, 3rd Baron Killanin
• Vincent Mulchrone
• Allison Pearson
• Melanie Phillips (left the Mail in September 2013, and now writes for The Times newspaper)
• Keith Waterhouse
• Valentine Williams (1883–1946) (General news correspondent and, during the First World War, chief of the Daily Mail war service. Later a popular mystery novelist.^[144])
• Peter Wildeblood (the paper's former royal correspondent diplomatic editor, was prosecuted for homosexuality in a high-profile trial in the 1950s)
• Herbert Wrigley Wilson
• Ian Wooldridge
• Evelyn Waugh
• Michael Winner

Editors

Source:^[145]

See also

• 1910 London to Manchester air race
• Daily Chronicle, a newspaper which merged with the Daily News to become the News Chronicle and was finally absorbed by the Daily Mail

Notes

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Daily Mail.

• Official website

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