 | Daily Mail: Encyclopedia II - Daily Mail - History
Daily Mail - History
The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe and his brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere), was first published on May 4, 1896 and was an immediate runaway success. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost a penny and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. Soon after its launch it had more than half a million readers.
Controlled editorially by Alfred, with Harold running the business side of the operation, the Mail from the start adopted a vigorously imperialist political stance, taking a strongly patriotic line in the Second Boer War, leading to claims that it was not reporting the issues of the day objectively. From the beginning, the Mail also set out to entertain its readers with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions (which were also the main means by which the Harmsworths promoted the paper).
In 1906 the paper offered £1,000 for the first flight across the English Channel, and £10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester. Punch magazine thought the idea preposterous and offered £10,000 for the first flight to Mars, but in 1910 both the Mail's prizes had been won.
In 1908 the Daily Mail began the Ideal Home Exhibition, which it still runs today.
The paper was accused of warmongering before the outbreak of World War I, when it reported that Germany was planning to crush the British Empire. Northcliffe created controversy by advocating conscription when the war broke out. On May 21, 1915, Northcliffe wrote a blistering attack on Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Kitchener was considered a national hero, and overnight the paper's circulation dropped from 1,386,000 to 238,000. 1,500 members of the London Stock Exchange ceremonially burned the unsold copies and launched a boycott against the Harmsworth Press. Herbert Asquith accused the paper of being disloyal to the country.
When Kitchener died the Mail reported it as a great stroke of luck for the British Empire. The paper then campaigned against Asquith, and Asquith resigned on December 5, 1916. His successor, David Lloyd George, asked Northcliffe to be in his cabinet, hoping it would prevent him criticising the government. Northcliffe declined.
In 1922, when Lord Northcliffe died, Lord Rothermere took full control of the paper.
In 1924 the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev Letter which indicated that British Communists were planning violent Revolution. It was widely believed that this was a significant factor in the defeat of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party in the 1924 general election, held four days later.
For a time in the early 1930s Rothermere and the Mail were sympathetic to some degree with Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Rothermere wrote an article, Hurrah for the Blackshirts, in January 1934, in which he praised Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine", though after the violence of the 1934 Olympia meeting involving the BUF the Mail withdrew its support.
The paper also published articles lamenting the number of German Jews entering Britain as refugees after the rise of Nazism.
Rothermere and the Mail supported Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, particularly during the events leading up to the Munich Agreement. However, after the Nazi invasion of Prague in 1939, the Mail changed position and urged Chamberlain to prepare for war, not least, perhaps, because on account of its stance it had been threatened with closure by the British Government. Up to this point, The Daily Mail had been the only British newspaper to consistently support the German National Socialist Party.
In 1982, a Sunday title, the Mail on Sunday was launched (the Sunday Mail was already the name of a newspaper in Scotland, owned by the Mirror Group.)
In 1992, the current editor, Paul Dacre, was appointed.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
