26 March, 2012

How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker

How the Daily Mail Conquered England : The New Yorker: Fred Goodwin, a married father of two, was an especially tasty mark for the Mail. He had demonstrated personal frailty as well as professional incompetence, by conducting an affair with a colleague as R.B.S. collapsed. In the Mail’s cosmology, men are giants or pygmies, strong or weak. (Women are assessed by other metrics.) Such is the Mail’s censoriousness that British Esquire recently deemed it the nation’s “purse-lipped mother-in-law.” After the affair, Goodwin obtained from the High Court a gag order that forbade the British media from reporting it. This rankled the Mail, which flouted the injunction without technically violating the law. If its competitors lob spitballs at their bugbears, the Mail strafes them with righteousness.