Both dreadfully boring and ideologically dishonest, so deliberately cryptic that you have to be a Bletchley Park veteran to actually understand what is being reported.

An excellent piece, Who reads the Daily Mail? by Ed West.  Growing up in England in the 1960s and 70s, I cannot help but think of the Daily Mail as a tabloid filled with juicy reporting both salacious and dubious.  

A brilliant spoof of the Daily Mail which captures my general bias against them.

Double click to enlarge.

I have mentioned a number of times my surprise in recent years about the Daily Mail's increasing influence in the USA.  

West has a nice potted history of the newspaper and several insights. 

The Times was once the old establishment paper that effortlessly evolved into the voice of economic and social liberalism. The Telegraph, started by an army colonel as part of a grudge against a member of the royal family, has long been the paper of the squirearchy, Tory but bohemian and eccentric at the edges; the Guardian, founded by Unitarian Manchester businessmen, represented the non-conformist tradition that evolved into Left-liberalism, always activated by a keen sense of social justice.

And the Daily Mail? The Mail is purest distilled Middle England. It’s Harry Potter’s uncle Vernon and aunt Petunia; it’s social climber Hyacinth Bucket; it’s Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge.

The paper is 125 years old today, and for most of that time has represented the soul of a particular kind of England, read in the golf courses of Surrey, the semis of suburban Essex, the pub gardens of Dorset. It is the most popular paper in Britain — it overtook the Sun last year — and easily the most hated. It’s guaranteed to get a laugh, or a sneer, when a comedian mentions its name. 

[snip]

It achieved this position by understanding its readership. While its opponents take comfort in the paper’s supposed ability to sway the public, in reality the Mail reflects its readers’ desires and fears. No other paper understands them better – their health, weight, love life, dieting desires and dating concerns, and moral worldview. It is censorious about sex but has more female flesh than any other paper. Whether it’s celebrity cellulite, or the slappers of Cardiff and Manchester drinking themselves to excess, it is almost always disapproving. Esquire magazine called it Britain’s “purse-lipped mother-in-law” and there is something in that.

It also understands what a story is and what angle interests people; the “public schoolboy gone bad into crime and drugs”, for example, is one of its favourite morality tales.

West then addresses the conundrum I have experienced - the Daily Mail reporting more timely and extensively American news than the American media.  

Yet while the newspaper’s power is waning, it has now opened up a new chapter beyond, with the Mail Online having just overtaken the New York Times to become the most visited newspaper site on earth, drawing over 50 million unique visitors a month.

The Mail is particularly successful in the US, where it has found a niche among mainstream news sites that are both dreadfully boring and ideologically dishonest, so deliberately cryptic that you have to be a Bletchley Park veteran to actually understand what is being reported. The Mail is popular with many Americans because, in contrast, it tries to tell a story – which is, after all, what journalism should be about. 

 As a British outsider, they are free to publish news which the American mainstream media will not.  Time and again, I pick up a whisper of some story.  I go to American media sites and find nothing.  I go to the the Daily Mail and there, days or weeks before the American media, are the earliest reports.  

They are still both salacious and dubious but they publish useful information where others, for political reasons, will not.