Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

I've been away from here for a while so apols if I'm missing an existing thread on this, but can't find one from a quick skim.

The latest outburst of sanctimonious sh1te from the editor in chief of the Daily Malice, backed up apparently by some bloke from the Sun, deserves to be noted with due contempt and ridicule.

Here's a Times report of it, which I choose in preference to the BBC's online coverage not out of softness on Murdoch but because it includes more verbatim quotes from Dacre's outpourings of hypocritical bile.

Just a few points in response:

1. Mr Justice Eady is interpreting statutes passed by Parliament. If the unsuccessful defendant is so sure that he has got it wrong, he can appeal. Dacre's comments are, in constitutional terms, bollocks.

2. I can't remember the exact words in the link attached, but they include something like "unimaginable depravity". Err, it's a bit of S&M between consenting adults in private, you dick, get a sense of perspective.

3. Given that the newspapers are basically after increased sales through low quality sexual titillation of prurient frustrated suburbanites, one is reminded of Billy Bragg's great lyric "they offer you a feature on stockings and suspenders next to calls for stiffer penalties for sex offenders".

[I.Wright]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

Dacre; 'the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard'

What tosh. Which part of 'the law' punishes uncivilised behaviour?

[ian.64]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

The hypocrisy of Dacre - who is known, via Private Eye, to uphold the tenets of moral integrity by peppering his own speech with 'cunt' every ten seconds - is depressing. The Daily Mail is a scum-sucking abhorrence to journalism and society itself, yet he remains - to my knowledge - on the panel of the Press Complaints Commission, which is a bit like having a pyromaniac head a commitee on fire safety.

Eady's not all that squeaky-clean considering - Private Eye, again - he's a judge who, on behalf of rich bastards with dodgy pasts concerning human rights, freely clamps down on any journalists in the UK or America who compile reports or write books or articles on their less than spotless lives, so, in effect, we have a cunt attacking a prick for having the power to prevent him being more of a cunt than he is now.

Can't someone just kill these wankers? Improve life by removing them from existence?

[Guest]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

It's not often I support Lord Falconer in a debate, but I enjoyed him giving Graham Dudman from The Sun an absolute pasting on Today yesterday.

That Eye article was largely bollocks, though. Plutocrats using their muscle to silence the press is depressing, but twas ever thus; and the Eye piece seemed to be based on the misconception that people of dodgy character deserve no protection against libel at all. Helpfully, the piece left out crucial details that would have undermined its case, eg what the allegations made by Vanity Fair against Roman Polanski were. Sadly, another example of reading a superficially convincing piece in the Eye that strays onto your territory, and realising it's rubbish.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

... known to uphold the tenets of moral integrity by peppering his own speech with 'cunt' every ten seconds

He'd fit in well on this board then.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

My Dad lives in one of those sleepy, horsey villages in Dorset, where everyone's a retired stockbroker and there really are Detective Sergeants with names like "Troy". Everyone reads the Daily Mail, and it's actually quite terrifying the level of indoctrination it breeds. People don't get that it's a complete parody, almost as comically brilliant as the middle section of Private Eye. They actually think it's reporting news , and in a serious way.

If you read the Daily Mail from cover to cover for a week you really will end up wanting to march on Westminster to demand that decent, local people be allowed to photograph their children at the school Nativity Play again (it's PC gone mad!), while at the same time demand the immediate reintroduction of public executions for suspected "paedophiles" (for example the insidious kinds of perverts lurking in our communities who might want to share and store images of each other's children performing at Nativity plays).

[Hofzinser]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

The Horse - a large part of the Eye's case against Eady, though, is that he allows dodgy plutocrats to use the British libel courts to curtail freedom of speech in other countries with more liberal libel laws, eg the USA. For instance, allowing a wealthy Arab businessman with no particular connection to Britain to sue an American author over what she wrote in a book published in America (and which wasn't available for sale in Britain). Which, unless the Eye has distorted things terribly, does seem pretty outrageous, and well worth kicking up a fuss over.

[Guest]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

Oh, indeed. That was the hook at the start of the piece. It's just that Ratbiter rather lost his way later on when he moved onto the merits of the cases, as opposed to whether Eady has jurisdiction in the first place.

[Ginger Yellow]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

In a scathing attack, he said the “arrogant and amoral” judgments of the judge were “inexorably and insidiously” imposing a privacy law on British newspapers.

That would be the privacy law that was passed by parliament in 1998 and has been part of UK jurisprudence for much longer.

The Daily Mail editor said this had huge implications for newspapers, whose “public shaming” of individuals had been a “vital element in defending the parameters of what are considered acceptable standards of social behaviour”.

For fuck's sake.

[gt3]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

Someone made an excellant point on r4 this morning that this is really all about falling sales in the tabloid market. They are the only ones who run these types of stories and if they can't then they'll go out of business. Both things sound like a good idea to me.

[Wyatt Earp]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

Ginger Yellow wrote:

For fuck's sake.

I know. "Parameters".

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Daily Mail/Paul Dacre

Ha ha, you've literally decimated Dacre's argument there Wyatt.