A Good Hate

Once upon a time the morning commute - by train, or bus, or by tube - would be full of people reading newspapers. There might be the odd rebel gazing out of the window, or reading a book, or perhaps updating their diary, but everyone else was reading a newspaper. And normally, the full range of newspapers was represented - from The Times to the Daily Express; from the Daily Telegraph to The Sun, and with the occasional Financial Times thrown in for some colour.

And you could tell who was who, and their social standing, by the newspaper they read, as was so eloquently put by the (fictional) PM, Jim Hacker in a 1986 episode of Yes, Prime Minister:

"Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."[1]

Today your average tube or train carriage, or bus, is filled with commuters tapping at lap-top keyboards, listening to their iPods, or scrolling through social media feeds on their mobile phones, and of those who are reading newspapers, the majority will be reading a free-sheet like Metro or The Evening Standard. Newspaper sales have declined significantly in Britain, as this graph shows:

A factor in the decline in newspaper readership has inevitably been the explosive growth of the internet, and mobile internet usage, with the younger generation embracing that technology at the expense of reading newspapers. When I started work and began commuting, people of my age read newspapers much more than they seem to now. I have no doubt that school teachers still implore their students to read 'a quality newspaper' (by which they generally mean The Times or Daily Telegraph) just as much as they did when I was young, but I bet that very few do. To be fair, many of us didn't when I was at school, we mostly read whatever our parents read, which in my case was The Daily Mirror. These days, with newspaper readership in such decline, many teenagers quite likely rarely see a paper at home, let alone read one.

Britain's most popular newspapers in print, with twelve and ten million monthly readers respectively, are The Sun and the Daily Mail. Contrarily, this country's two most unpopular newspapers - by which I mean the papers held in the lowest esteem - are The Sun and the Daily Mail. The Sun, detested  on Merseyside since its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, has made itself even more unpopular with the piece written by Kelvin McKenzie about Ross Barkley and has found itself banned by both Liverpool and Everton football clubs. The disapproval in which the newspaper is held resulted in the then Labour leader Ed Miliband having to apologise for having his picture taken with a copy of a special edition that the paper produced in 2014 to mark England's World Cup campaign. Now whatever one may think of The Sun, it remains a legitimate part of the mainstream media and for a politician to have felt he had to apologise for any sort of association with it is remarkable, especially when one considers its position as the top selling printed paper. As many people have remarked, it is extraordinary how well The Sun sells considering that no one will admit to reading it.

A lot of people are not prepared to admit to reading the Daily Mail, either - well, not unless they want some abuse lobbed in their direction - despite its huge readership. According to a YouGov poll, it is thought of as bigoted, right-wing (needing to point this out is a bit like having to describe water as being wet), biased, nasty, and misleading by its detractors. Meanwhile, its supporters think it is in touch with ordinary people, interesting, informative, and prepared to stand up for ordinary people. It is suggestive that 'ordinary people' get two mentions among the paper's positive points, and one wonders whether these ordinary people find that the Mail reflects their own views or whether it leads and guides them. I suspect that for many people, the Mail's position merely validates their own. Again, it is remarkable how many people, who claim they never read the Mail, are able to quote chapter and verse on what it has written, which they subsequently find so offensive.

Reality TV stars and WAGS -
the staple of The Sidebar of Shame

The Daily Mail sells in the region of 1.4million copies per day, and when one factors in the received wisdom that says that the average number of readers of a printed paper is six, that's over six million readers per day, or nearly ten percent of the population. But where the Mail really scores is in its online readership, with dailymail.co.uk getting over ten million visits per day, and receiving 240million visitors globally each month, including 80million in the US. And, in case you had not seen it, the most renowned - or perhaps, notorious - element of the website is The Sidebar Of Shame. The Sidebar Of Shame, the right-hand graphical element of the site, contains literally hundreds of thumbnails of celebrities (the majority of whom you will never have heard of) in various states of dress, undress, and distress, accompanied by text of such inanity that it makes your brain hurt.

The Mail's website cannot, with the 1,200+ stories it publishes each day, exercise the same editorial control that is possible in a printed paper, hence the cavalier attitude to grammar that sometimes prevails. The apparent reliance on spellcheckers and predictive text often result in completely inappropriate words appearing. My favourite was where something 'spread like wildlife,' instead of 'like wildfire.' Hilarious, as MailOnline itself might describe it.

I used to be a Daily Mail reader; when I started work I wanted a tabloid sized paper (broadsheets being too inconvenient on buses and trains to my mind), and the Mail was then perhaps not quite as rabid as it is now. And it was worth buying for the columns by Ian Wooldridge and Keith Waterhouse alone;  to my mind they were two of the finest writers to grace the pages of any British newspaper, let alone the Mail. I gave up buying the paper a year or so before I retired because as it's number of pages grew it started to become too large to read, and much of it was uninteresting. Instead, I started picking up the more compact and - in a half-hour train journey - more easily digestible, Metro, which has the added bonus of being free.

The wonderful Ian Wooldridge and Keith Waterhouse

I still buy the Mail, but only on Saturdays and solely for the TV guide in the Weekend magazine supplement (honest!) The paper itself gets flicked through in a cursory manner; little gets read since most of it is features I am uninterested in or opinion pieces - and I'm not short of my own opinions.

Alfred (“Sunny”) Harmsworth, who co-founded the Mail in 1896, said, at around the time of the second Boer War, that, "The British people relish a good hero...and a good hate." In terms of giving the public things to hate in 2017, the Mail is still providing good value for money.

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[1] And of course, the punch line -supplied by his Private Secretary, Bernard Woolley - after Jim Hacker was asked about people who read The Sun, was, "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."