The Daily Mirror: Encyclopedia - The Daily Mirror

The Daily Mirror

The Daily Mirror is a British tabloid daily newspaper. For a period during the 1990s it was renamed The Mirror, but reverted to its original name in 2002.

The Daily Mirror - Early years

The Daily Mirror was launched on November 2, 1903 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) as a newspaper for women, run by women. It was not a success, and in 1904 he decided to turn it into a pictorial newspaper, firing the women journalists and appointing Hamilton Fyfe as editor. With its innovative use of photography and populist right-wing politics, the relaunched Mirror rapidly established itself with a circulation of more than 500,000.

When Northcliffe died in 1921, ownership of the Mirror passed to his brother Harold Harmsworth (Lord Rothermere). Circulation continued to grow: by 1930 the Mirror was selling more than 1 million copies a day and had the third-largest sale among Briitsh national newspapers, behind only the Daily Express (owned by Lord Beaverbrook) and the Daily Mail (also owned by Rothermere).

Rothermere used the Mirror for his own political purposes just as he used the Mail. Both papers were an integral part of his joint campaign with Beaverbrook for "Empire Free Trade" in 1929-32, and the Mirror, like the Mail, gave enthusiastic support to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists in 1933-34 — support that Rothermere hastily withdrew after middle-class readers recoiled at the BUF's violence at a rally at Olympia.

By the mid-1930s, however, the Mirror was struggling — it and the Mail were the main casualties of the early-1930s circulation war that saw the Daily Herald and the Express establish circulations of more than 2 million — and Rothermere decided to sell his shares in it. His withdrawal paved the way for one of the most remarkable reworkings of a newspaper's identity ever seen.

The Daily Mirror - The Mirror transformed

With Cecil King (Rothermere's nephew) in charge of the paper's business side and Guy Bartholomew in charge of the editorial side, the Mirror in the late 1930s transformed itself from a gently declining, respectable, right-wing, middle-class newspaper into a sensationalist left-wing paper for the working class that was a runaway business success. The Mirror was the first UK paper to adopt the appearance of the New York tabloids and the only popular paper to campaign consistently against the appeasement of Hitler. By 1939, it was selling 1.4 million copies a day.

During the second world war, the Mirror positioned itself as the paper of the "ordinary" soldier and civilian, critical of the incompetence of the old-fashioned establishment, and in the 1945 general election it campaigned vigorously for a Labour government. By the late 1940s, it was selling 4.5 million copies a day, outstripping the Express – and for some 30 years after that it dominated the British daily newspaper market, selling at its peak in the mid-1960s more than 5 million copies a day.

The Daily Mirror - Toppled by Murdoch

The Mirror was the first newspaper to achieve a mass working-class readership - but it was also complacent about its success. In 1960, it acquired the Daily Herald, the popular daily of the labour movement, when it bought Odhams, in one of a series of takeovers that created the International Publishing Corporation (IPC). The Mirror management did not want the Herald competing with the Mirror for working-class readers and in 1964 relaunched it as a mid-market paper, the Sun. And when it failed to win readers, the Sun was off-loaded unceremoniously to Rupert Murdoch -- who immediately relaunched it as a more populist and more sensationalist tabloid competitor to the Mirror.

Since then, the story of the Mirror has been one of continuous decline. By the mid-1970s, the Sun had overtaken the Mirror's circulation, and in 1984 the Mirror was sold to Robert Maxwell, who bled the paper dry. After Maxwell's death in 1992, the Mirror went through a protracted crisis before ending up in the hands of Trinity Mirror, its current owner.

The Daily Mirror - The Mirror today

Trinity Mirror is based at One Canada Square — the focal building in London's Canary Wharf development.

In 1978, the paper announced its support for a United Ireland.

During the 1990s the paper was accused of dumbing-down in an attempt to poach readers from Rupert Murdoch's Sun, although judging by their relative sales figures this was unsuccessful. Also in 2002 the Mirror changed its logo from red to black (attempting to dissociate the paper from the term "red top", meaning a sensationalist mass-market tabloid, although on 6 April 2005 the red top came back, albeit most likely in honor of the Labour Party which it supports) and it has made efforts to concentrate on solid journalism rather than celebrity scandals — not always successfully.

Under then-editor Piers Morgan, it was the only tabloid newspaper in the UK to be hostile to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In May 2004, it published what it claimed were photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The decision to publish the photos, which were subsequently shown to be hoaxes, led to the sacking of Morgan on 14 May 2004.

The tabloid gained national fame within the United States with its cover on November 4. 2004. By this point, President Bush had been officially re-elected, and the newspaper headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" The cover became a favourite of liberal web sites.

The current editor is Richard Wallace.

The Daily Mirror - The Sunday Mirror

The Sunday Mirror is a Sunday newspaper with the same ownership as and a similar style to The Daily Mirror.

The current editor is Tina Weaver.

The Daily Mirror - Fake abuse photos

In 2004, the Daily Mirror was the subject of a "calculated and malicious hoax" [1] , publishing what turned out to be mocked-up fake pictures of British soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees. The newspaper issued a statement apologizing for the printing of the pictures and immediately accepted the resignation of then editor Piers Morgan. The tabloid's rival, The Sun, offered a £50,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of those accused of faking the Mirror photographs.

See also

• The 3AM Girls - gossip columnists

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