Thread by @docrussjackson

Toxic divisive ranting anti-@BBC culture war shithouse Paul Dacre has been appointed as the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail’s parent company because good sense & public outcry prevented him from becoming the next chair of the media regulator, @Ofcom.

theguardian.com/media/2021/nov…

A new guide from @StopFundingHate & Ethical Consumer @EC_magazine explains how you can help make Dacre's & Murdoch's divisive hate unprofitable.

#StopFundingHate

ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaig…

The Mail under Dacre has been criticised for an alleged racist attitude towards the stories it covers. Nick Davies recounts an anecdote from a former Snr news reporter who, en route to a murder scene of a woman & her two children was told to return because the victims were black.

Cristina Odone says Dacre has a reputation towards underlings of "verbal abuse" & "a drill sergeant's delight in public humiliation". Nick Davies wrote Dacre's staff called his morning editorial meetings the "Vagina Monologues" because of his habit of calling everybody a "cunt".

Conrad Black, a convicted fraudster and ex-proprietor of the Telegraph papers, considers him "a saturnine and capricious manipulator".

In 2013, Stephen Fry said Dacre "decries indecency on one page & pushes his male readers" into looking at "a semi-nude actress on another."

Fry coninued: "His cancer scare, miracle cure stories are sickeningly anti-science & the only good thing to be said about his Mail is that no one decent or educated believes in it".

Andrew O'Hagan wrote in the London Review of Books in 2017 that Dacre's "worst effect" on the Mail "has been to let it seem mired in the things it hates, as if society's worst excesses were mostly an outgrowth of its own paranoid imagination".

In O'Hagan's view, under its editor the Mail was a "bubbling quagmire of prejudice posing as news, of opinion dressed as fact, & contempt posing as contempt for that portion of the world's population that doesn't live in Cheam".

Rachel Johnson, writing in The Spectator in 2001, noted that photographs taken of women for the features pages of the Mail must comply with the 'Dacre Rules' which she considered a "patriarchal, sexist, trivialising treatment of women".

"If you dare to take on the Mail you are a marked man (or woman)", wrote Roy Greenslade in 2013.

"When the Mail has a target in its sights, the victims suffer", wrote Brian MacArthur in The Times over a decade earlier.

The Mail's treatment of asylum seekers & members of other vulnerable groups is a particular source of grievance for many critics: "Maybe we anti-racists have been naive to think that [the Stephen Lawrence campaign] was anything more than an aberration" - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Dacre also attacked the @BBC as a "monolith" pursuing "cultural Marxism" (the antisemitic conspiracy theory cited by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik) which has a singular world view & is contemptuous of "ordinary people".

"The @BBC's political correctness is, in fact, an ideology of rigid self-righteousness in which those who do not conform are ignored, silenced, or vilified as sexist, racist, fascist or judgmental" - Dacre. It's as though sexism, racism & neo-fascism don't exist in Dacre's world.

When Gregg Dyke was @BBC Director General he said "we did a piece of research on the readership of the Daily Mail & found that they were more likely to appreciate and like the BBC than the public at large. In other words, he thinks his readers are all like him but they are not".

Martin Kettle wrote that in #GE2005, 22% of Mail readers voted Labour, 14% LibDem & 7% for other non-Conservative candidates. "In this respect, therefore, the editor who claims to have a hotline to the national mood turns out to have something of a crossed line instead".

While Dacre said "it is the duty of the media to take an ethical stand", according to Peter Wilby "his idea of ethics includes running stories that are, at best, distorted and, at worst, plain wrong".

A 2005 MORI poll of Mail & Express readers suggested they believed immigration was 20% of the British population, when the true figure then was about 7%.

DMGT had paid damages to Hugh Grant for a false February 2007 story in The Mail on Sunday, but at the Leveson Inquiry Dacre accused Grant of being "obsessed with trying to drag the Daily Mail into another newspaper's scandal".

Grant stood by his accusation of the Mail phone hacking in an interview on the Today radio programme.

In successive appearances at Leveson, Rupert Murdoch & then Paul Dacre accused the other of having acting unethically in their respective business interests.

Dacre's Leveson appearances were described as being "defiant, disingenuous and in denial", by Kevin Marsh. "It was a chilling insight into a warped mindset", Marsh wrote in the book, The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial.

In 2013, Dacre became the subject of criticism across the UK media & political spectrum after the Daily Mail published a piece on 28 September maligning Ralph Miliband, a deceased Marxist academic & father of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition at the time.

The articles published by the Mail were criticised by publications including The Spectator & The Times, as well as by major figures in the Conservative Party. Michael Heseltine condemned the Mail for demeaning the level of political debate, as did former Tory Minister John Moore.

In 2016 David Cameron is believed to have contacted Dacre's boss, Remainer Lord Rothermere, to persuade him to sack Dacre. Dacre was reputedly "incandescent" in when told by a Westminster source of Cameron's approach to Rothermere, which strengthened Dacre's Brexit convictions.

Ian Burrell wrote that Dacre loathed Cameron, because of his dislike of his changes to the Conservatives. The Daily Mail serialised an unauthorised & unflattering biography of Cameron written by Michael Ashcroft & Isabel Oakeshott which contained the unverified "Piggate" claims.

In April 2016, Charles Moore wrote in The Spectator that the Daily Mail was covering the referendum campaign with "more anger than melancholy" with "bellowings of Eurosceptic rage from the great Paul Dacre".

The Mail, the day before the referendum: "Lies. Greedy elites. Or a great future outside a broken, dying Europe.. If You Believe in Britain, Vote Leave". The paper & its editor, according to David Bond "have been leading the Eurosceptic charge against Brussels for two decades".

"One of the triumphs of the campaign was for Murdoch & Dacre, two of the wealthiest people journalism has ever produced, to portray anyone in favour of Remain as part of this Metropolitan elite" - AlastairCampbell.

Dacre backed Theresa May as David Cameron's successor as PM following his resignation after the referendum result. Dacre & May had met just before she announced her leadership bid. Following May's announcement, the next day's front page of the Mail insisted "It must be Theresa".

According to Gaby Hinsliff, Dacre considered Boris Johnson, as "morally reprehensible, because of his serial affairs, & fundamentally unserious".

Despite this, the Mail's Sarah Vine believed Dacre (& Murdoch) would back Johnson if Michael Gove, was also part of the same ticket.

According to Anthony Barnett, Dacre wants to combine Thatcherism with Churchillism - a successful formula for appealing to "middle-class readers nostalgic for the lost world of post-war greatness, yet fearful of anything that smacks of the collectivism of those years".

In the period following the Brexit vote, Roy Greenslade suggested the Daily Mail's "savage" "full-frontal assault on... anyone hopeful of upending the EU referendum vote for Brexit" was a reflection of Dacre's worries that MPs might reverse or mitigate the vote.

After the High Court ruled that a government bill must pass through parliament in order for Britain to leave the EU, the dangerously irresponsible Mail described the judges involved as being "Enemies of the People" - resulting in being accused of "undermining the rule of law".

In June 2018, to the great relief of all decent people, it was announced that Dacre's period as editor of the Daily Mail would end in time for his 70th birthday in November 2018.

Along with Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre has been - & still is - a toxic, hateful & divisive influence.

The REAL 'enemies of the people':

#dontbuythemail
#dontbuythesun
#dontbuytheexpress
#dontbuythetelegraph