There are many reasons why people hate the Daily Mail – reflecting the fact that the Daily Mail is itself filled with hate. 

The Mail hates everything: foreigners, migrants, judges, the myopic middle-class who drag themselves up the greasy pole and are made to feel as if they still don’t belong – where or to what is unclear. The Mail despises woke, the homeless, eco-warriors, noisy marchers, trade unions, European culture, American accents, educated women and female politicians because they are not Margaret Thatcher.

The Mail loathes Labour, its followers, ideals, obsession with equanimity, haircuts and well-founded fear of telling it as it is. It abhors the poor, disabled and oppressed with their tedious needs for education, health, decent schools, housing, clean water, opportunity and the bike Norman Tebbit advised them to get on.

If a Royal pulls the wrong face or makes the wrong move, the Mail will shows its disapproval in subtle snide ways envied by the other tabloids. Prince Harry in 2023 sued the Mail over an article claiming his aides tried to spin his dispute with the Home Office over its decision to downgrade his taxpayer funded police protection. He lost the case and was ordered to pay the Mail £50,000 in costs. 

Why people hate the Daily Mail is at least more understandable than why so many sheeple buy, read, trust and believe the columns of lies, half-truths, pulp fiction and propaganda published daily and relentlessly in the Daily Mail. As of 2020, it has become the highest circulation newspaper in the UK with sales of more than a million and earning in 2023 a net profit of £977 million.

Daily Mail Peers

The Daily Mail is owned by Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, the great-grandson of one of the original co-founders. While championing Liar Johnson, Farage, Mogg and Brexit to his readers, Rothermere ‘identifies as French,’ has non-dom status and lives in a mansion in Monaco. His company is registered as the Daily Mail and General Trust in Bermuda, a tax haven. Viscount Rothermere – with a personal net worth of £1 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List – doesn’t pay any income tax anywhere.

The Daily Mail launched on 4 May 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) in partnership with his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere). It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny and followed a popularist agenda. 

In the 1930s, Lord Rothermere used the Daily Mail to influence British politics by showing strong support for the appeasement of Nazi Germany. He visited and corresponded with Hitler on many occasions. He sent him a telegram in support of Germany’s invasion of the Sudetenland in September 1938; he congratulated him after the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and encouraged Hitler to invade Romania.

Love and Hate

Explaining why people love or hate the Daily Mail is clearly a question of their political stance and/or gullibility. The job of a newspaper is to research, check and present facts. According to the editors at Wikipedia, the Daily Mail is ‘generally unreliable’ as a source of facts and does not allow it to be used as a reference in its online encyclopedia. To put the severity of this decision in context, Wikipedia does allow references to Russia Today and Fox News, neither known for their impartiality.

Not every story in the Daily Mail is untrue. Propaganda is more subtle that. Book and movie reviews, travelogues, sports coverage, interviews with choreographers, authors, actors and architects are covered by diligent journalists and writers working hard on their 500 word pieces.

It is the political coverage, editorials and opinion columns that bend, reshape, invert and spin truth into lies to advance an agenda that supports the Conservative Party, the far right, low taxes, small government, neoliberalism and tax havens where Jonathan Harmsworth can flaunt his title, stash his wealth and does nothing and support the health service, social institutions and the 4.2 million children in Britain going hungry and living in poverty, according to the Child Action Poverty Group. Such neglect of duty and responsibility is not the act of a patriot but a traitor.

oOo

The Daly Mail front page shows overwhelming support for Liz Truss who presented to Parliament an extremist, neoliberal mini-budget that cost Britain between £30 and £60 billion in losses on world markets. The strapline across the top of the page reveals the newspaper’s ongoing war on Harry and Meghan. 

Additional reporting by Mark Duffield.

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