Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, has written in the Guardian this morning. It's a rant, and a rather nasty rant, as might be expected. The key phrase is this though:
[T]he Mail constantly dares to stand up to the liberal-left consensus that dominates so many areas of British life and instead represents the views of the ordinary people who are our readers and who don't have a voice in today's political landscape and are too often ignored by today's ruling elite.
Many thoughts flow from that but I'll restrict myself to three as I am in my office early on a Saturday morning to work. The first is that if Dacre really thinks this then he has such poor ability to appraise the prevailing hegemonic thought of the UK and many of the western democracies that he is unfit to run a newspaper. There is a consensus, but it is that of the neoliberal right that exists to reward the 1% in society - who are not, incidentally, Daily Mail readers, so he is failing them with his thinking.
The second thought is that if he does know that what he's saying is wrong then he is not fit to run a newspaper.
The third follows from these two. He rants about the BBC and, to more limited degree, the Guardian in the article. But the BBC is much more trusted, despite all its troubles, than the Mail is. If he was fit to run a newspaper he might want to ask why that is.
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Actually the extract you quote could be right if you don’t equate the “liberal left consensus” with the “ruling elite” as I don’t. The consensus does have a strong voice in the media and intellectual life, but the ruling neo-liberal elite ignores both the consensus and Daily Mail readers as well.
Interesting point
Did you see Question Time last week? The audience spontaneously burst out laughing – not just some sarcastic sniggers, proper belly laughs – when Quentin Letts insisted that the Daily Mail was an ‘anti-establishment’ paper. He was visibly shaken by that, almost like he couldn’t get his head around it.
I think in their own little mental universe the country really is run by Beeb socialists and pinko trade unionists (whereas in reality these are a dying breed, if they ever existed at all).
It’s probably true that Rupert Murdoch, for example, was an outsider to the establishment when he started out but he’s certainly not now. Times change, often for the worse! But the DM were never in that position at any point in history, as far as I can see.
I’m not a Marxist but when the ol’ beardie weirdie is right he’s right: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
The DM may not represent the ‘centre ground’ of establishment ideology but they do represent its worst excesses, its dregs, its most toxic sludge. They are its gutter. Gutter press in the truest sense.
I don’t think they believe it. They are repeating propaganda points which have proved successful for a long time. By now the word “socialist” or “leftie” or “pinko” has lost all meaning and is tantamount to saying “boo”
As an example of how this language game is played consider Vince Cable on the price of energy on the Today programme this week. He said at one point that the high cost of energy is due to high wholesale prices driven up by demand in China and India. Later in the same interview he said that the problem is lack of competition due to there being few suppliers in this country.
Just think about that for a moment and try to work out how many things are wrong with it. The theory of the good effects of more competition is the obverse of the “pinko elite” narrative: more competition = “hurrah”
There is no need to spell out just how competition makes things better any more: it just doesl. So when we have more competition (ie privatisation- for those things are similarly conflated) and things get worse the answer is that we do not have enough competition. This is taken for granted. It is an argument free zone
I don’t think the man is stupid. But I do agree with Richard, that he shouldn’t be running a paper – he should be in Public Relations. This is the kind of thing they do – sustain a view, that has little semblance of reality – it is in essence propaganda and mass psychology. Not unlike the tactic used by sporting teams (and political parties in election campaigns)to make out that they are the “under-dog” and the other side the stronger party; when in fact the reverse is true. It is unfortunate that Dacre may confuse many readers, which is the desired result.
In Australia, we also have radio ‘shock-jock’ jockeys who perform a similar role. Hundreds of thousands of listeners are each day treated to these ‘demagogues’ who rant on about the evils of the left and how they are hurting the poor Aussie battler, blah-blah. When you look closely at the background of these radio personalities, you often find links to big business or the conservative end of town. Does the U.K. also have to contend with radio ‘personalities’?
Does he really say that we’re dominated by liberal left voices? Voices like Cameron, Osborne, IDS and UKIP?
Apparently so
You know someone is a ‘fascist’ when they turn reality on its head so completely as this and then claims to speak for ‘ordinary’ people. Strangely, he doesn’t seem to realise that he’s got what he wants, that is, a neo-liberal hegemony/oligarchy/kleptocracy/plutocracy/neo-feudalism/debt-peonaged society that he presides over – yet, in order to hide this fact, he has to pretend the opposite is the case – pathological stuff!
Not sure the left vs right dichotomy is clear or helpful. On key issues both sides of Parliament appear to agree, e.g. on economic migration, though one suspects for different reasons (the Conservatives because importing cheap labour undercuts the working class’ attempts to maintain and improve wage rates, New Labour because it “rubs the Right’s nose in diversity” and – they hope – brings in fresh supporters for the Big State).
The hegemony is that of coldly calculating careerist politicians and hangers-on who now know how to make the psephological machine work. Bear in mind that only one-third of MPs get 50%+ of the votes cast in a General Election (true in 2007 and 2010, for example), and look how they cooperated across the floor of the House to rubbish the Alternative Vote. Dum and Dee. I shall never forget seeing Cameron lead the applause for Blair as the latter parachuted out of Parliament and into the arms of JPM, and how only 4 MPs sat on their hands.
I read the Daily Mail, just as Philip appears to read Karl Marx – critically (BTW – reference for the quotation, please?). This is something Radio 4 comedians and their obediently sniggering audiences don’t seem to understand. When they slag off the DM, perhaps for the sake of balance they can remind their sycophantic listeners how the journalists in the Guardian newsroom watched the Twin Towers burn live on TV and said the Americans had it coming to them. As far as I’m concerned no paper and no TV station represents “pravda” or “izvestiya”.
Sometimes it isn’t helpful to think in terms of “left” & “right”.
As Richard has said, the BBC actually has a severe right-wing bias in its economics reporting yet all you will hear about is “left wing bias”. This isn’t, actually, that surprising.
The media is biased to “the left” socially, because it is, overwhelmingly, made up of arts graduates who live in London. So is most of the city. People like that don’t, overtly at least, hate homosexuals or people of different ethnicities.
The media is biased to “the right” economically, because it is, overwhelmingly, made up of people who live in nice parts of London & the SE. They wouldn’t recognise a food-bank if it hit them in the face & they have never known anyone IN council accommodation, so have no reason to doubt Iain Duncan Smith’s comment that such people have hundreds of spare rooms available if we only apply the hot irons.
Changes that make a real difference to real lives are decided by the manouvering of public school eejits on a Westminster monopoly board.
Sorry,
to follow up. As Richard says, DM readers tend not to be in that “elite” of society, which is why they feel able to express dislikes that most wealthy people would see as “dirty & low class”, such as being racist, homophobic, &/or generally prejudiced. They want to express their feelings but lack the ability.
You will often read “only in Britain” headlines, which usually aren’t true (Only in Britain will people drink to get drunk.. err try Russia, Poland, S Africa, Mexico, Peru etc etc).
One that (I think) is true: “only in Britain is “intellectual” an insult”.
Fair play, but isn’t there something uniquely DIRTY about the Daily Mail, like you wouldn’t want to be seen with it ?
As everyone on here seems to agree that non of the elite read the Daily Mail.
Which papers do the elite read???
The real elite don’t read papers, they write them.
Or, to be more exact, they own the people that write the papers.