Daily Mail: Encyclopedia II - Daily Mail - Editorial stance

Daily Mail - Editorial stance

The Daily Mail considers itself to be the voice of Middle England, speaking up for the small-c conservative values of large swathes of the British population which it considers to be unjustly despised and neglected by the liberal establishment. It generally takes an anti-European, anti-immigration, anti-abortion (Despite its widely criticised "Abortion-hope" headline following the supposed discovery of a Gay Gene) stance, and is correspondingly pro-family, pro-tax cuts and pro-monarchy, as well as advocating stricter punishments for crime. The paper is generally critical of the BBC, which it perceives as being biased to the Left, but it is less unequivocally supportive of deregulation and commercial broadcasting than more downmarket papers such as The Sun, and supports a return to a somewhat nostalgic idea of what the BBC once was in a way that The Sun generally does not. Some have said that this is because the Mail has no connections to a broadcaster such as British Sky Broadcasting, although its parent company does own a share in ITN.

The Mail values the British countryside, while being pro-car and anti-environmentalist. In Richard Littlejohn, who recently returned from The Sun, it has arguably one of the most right-wing columnists in popular British journalism, alongside Peter Hitchens, who joined its sister title the Mail on Sunday in 2001. The editorial board has been highly critical of Prime Minister Tony Blair and endorsed the Conservative Party in the 2005 general election. [1]

The Daily Mail is currently the most widely read paper amongst women, and has a higher proportion of female readers than any other British national daily, although this is in part because of its Femail supplement aimed at women, and the popularity of its crosswords and horoscopes (it was the first newspaper to carry horoscopes even though at the time it was still technically an offence under the Witchcraft Act), in addition to its embrace of the popular Sudoku number puzzles. Moreover, the paper has led several causes more often associated with the political left, and seemingly at odds with its more conservative roots. Most notably, it was one of the first papers to champion the case of Stephen Lawrence [2], a black teenager who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in Eltham, London. In 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 that "if we are wrong, let them sue us". This caused some surprise in media circles.

Editorials have been bitterly critical of the George W. Bush administration, particularly in connection with the Iraq War. This may suggest that the Mail supports an older, more Americosceptic school of British conservatism (a kind of British equivalent of paleoconservatism) as opposed to the more neoconservative sympathies of Rupert Murdoch's British titles (Michael Gove criticised the Mail for this reason in The Times in April 2004). The Mail issued a rather soft endorsement (titled "Time for a Change?") of U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry in the leader of November 2, 2004. However, a leader after the election subsequently called Bush's re-election "a victory for the values that are so often ignored or derided by political establishments in Britain and Europe and are never (to our detriment) debated with the moral seriousness seen in America."

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Editorial stance", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki