Saturday, October 5, 2013

The Daily Mail isn’t fit for purpose

Reblogged from Michael Meacher MP:


I suppose we must thank the Mail for exposing so starkly and vividly just what a despicable purveyor of poison it is, so consumed by bigotry and hatred of all things progressive in British life that it can so grossly misrepresent Ed Miliband’s father who fought for Britain in the war when the Mail sided with the Nazis in the 1930s , and then sent reporters deliberately to disrupt a Miliband family memorial service to try to extract further mischievous comments.     Not only was this an appalling breach for anyone with a shred of common decency, it is also well-timed to inform the deliberations of the Privy Council as it decides in this next week which of the regulatory charters is to be put forward – the royal charter supported by all the political parties or the one concocted at the last moment by the right-wing press to maintain their stranglehold over the nation’s information and thought patterns. Dacre, bullying and foul-mouthed Ayatollah of the Mail – the man who redoubled the felony by reprinting the Mail on Sunday’s slander about Miliband’s father and then refused to apologise for the gatecrashing of the memorial service – this is the man who under current self-regulation is chair of the editors’ code of practice committee.   There couldn’t be a better illustration of how unfit such a man is to run a newspaper, let alone have oversight of the nation’s journalistic ethics.

To say that we have a free press when it is run by such characters as Murdoch, Dacre, Desmond, and the Barclay brothers is a contradiction in terms.   It is in fact monopolised by an exceedingly rich coterie of private tycoons who, despite their protestations, make sure through their appointment of editors that their viscerally right-wing prejudices permeate the culture and content of the newspapers they own.   A free press is one that is owned and controlled neither by the State nor by an individual purely on the basis of wealth.   The Dacre affair at the Mail shows just how far the latter can allow the culture and ethics of a paper to degenerate into out-of-control vindictiveness and personal animus which is utterly contrary to the principles of a genuinely free press.

Ed Miliband has been brave, and right, to take on the excesses of corporate power which are so badly tarnishing British life.    He took on, and won, against Murdoch over BSkyB, against the rabid Fleet Street frenzy over Leveson, against the Big Six energy profiteers over gas and electricity pricing, against the banks over their exploitation and irresponsibility, and against the new private monopolies like G4S, A4E, Serco and Capita over their abuse of power.   But there is nowhere which cries out for reform so much as the unconscionable press which in their present form and ownership are revealing themselves as utterly unfit for purpose.