Daily Mail and Mail Online CSP:

Daily Mail and Mail Online CSP: 

Daily Mail and Mail Online analysis 

1) What are the most significant front page headlines seen in the Daily Mail in recent years?

'New dawn for Britain' -Brexit related stories.

2) Ideology and audience: What ideologies are present in the Daily Mail? Is the audience positioned to respond to stories in a certain way?

Explicitly reflected of The Daily Mail's conventionally conservative/right-wing views and bias. Their reflection of Theresa May is quite positive; during a time where news coverage surrounding her efforts is usually negative, this article highlights their support of the Conservative party and what they stand for.

3) How do the Daily Mail stories you have studied reflect British culture and society?

It reflects British culture and society as they cater to what the public are familiar with.

Now visit Mail Online and look at a few stories before answering these questions:

1) What are the top five stories? Are they examples of soft news or hard news? Are there any examples of ‘clickbait’ can you find?

2) To what extent do the stories you have found on MailOnline reflect the values and ideologies of the Daily Mail newspaper?

In my opinion I feel like they reflect the values and ideologies to a rather large extent, as they are, in retrospect, attempts to cover foreign and or national news that reflect the publics needs. 

3) Think about audience appeal and gratifications: why is MailOnline the most-read English language newspaper website in the world? How does it keep you on the site?

Blumler and Katz, uses and gratifications theory - Diversion and surveillance


Factsheet 175 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 1)


1) What news content generally features in the Daily Mail?

The Daily Mail is a national tabloid middle market daily paper in the UK. This means that the paper includes a combination of serious journalism and entertainment, occupying the middle ground between broadsheets that cover hard news  and the more down-market sensationalist tabloid papers .

2) What is the Daily Mail’s mode of address? 

To understand how the Daily Mail address their readership, we need to know who the dominant readership is. From the NRS data, we can see that the dominant readership for the Daily Mail are adults aged 65+, in the demographic group ABC1(C2).

3) What techniques of persuasion does the Daily Mail use to attract and retain readers?

A method used by the Daily Mail is the use of techniques of persuasion to establish a consensus

in line with the political and social ideologies. These techniques are subtle and will attempt to stir the emotions of the consumer to prompt consensus. These techniques are split into 3 areas: Practical, Emotional, Associations.

4) What is the Daily Mail’s editorial stance?

The Mail’s political stance is traditionally Conservative, having supported the party in all recent general elections. The paper is also known for criticism of the Labour party, and in particular the current leader Jeremy Corbyn (correct as of January 2018). So much so, that during the 2015 general election, The Daily Mail advocated readers in some constituencies to vote UKIP (as the main challenger to the Labour Party). The paper is often critical of the BBC, seeing it as an institution biased to the left. Other published pieces reveal a pro- Brexit, consumerist stance that supports traditional Britishness.

5) Read this brilliant YouGov article on British newspapers and their political stance. Where does the Daily Mail fit in the overall picture of UK newspapers? 

In a recent YouGov poll (Feb 20-22, 2017), of those questioned “81% considered the [Daily Mail] to be right-wing to one degree or another” with 44% considering it as “very right-wing”. These responses were largely unaffected by the ideologies of those questioned, and highlights that the media is seen as being dominated by a more right-wing press.

Factsheet 177 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 2)


1) How did the launch of the Daily Mail change the UK newspaper industry?

Technological developments allowed the Daily Mail to increase their volume of sales, and then offer an affordable cover price for the lower middle-class readership. The new layout appealed to this newly literate readership, but also to advertisers who provided a large chunk of the revenue. As the advertisements took a fair proportion of the space, the news content that arrived in the Daily Mail newsroom had to be internally edited to fit the space available. This gave way to a new single style and tone of news across the entire paper.

2) What company owns the Daily Mail? What other newspapers, websites and brands do they own?

The Daily Mail is owned by the British Media company DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust plc) and “manages a balanced multinational portfolio of entrepreneurial companies, with total revenues of almost

£1.5bn.”

3) Between 1992 and 2018 the Daily Mail editor was Paul Dacre. What is Dacre’s ideological position and his view on the BBC?

Something must be done about my favourite bête noire: the ever-growing ubiquity of the BBC. For make no mistake, we are witnessing the seemingly inexorable growth of what is effectively a dominant state-sponsored news service. The corporation has all but seen off ITV’s news services, both nationally and locally, has crippled commercial radio, is distorting the free market for internet newspapers and now, with its preposterous proposal for 65 ultra-local websites, is going for the jugular of the local newspaper industry. Lines must be drawn in the sand.

4) Why did Guardian journalist Tim Adams describe Dacre as the most dangerous man in Britain? What example stories does Adams refer to?

There is a series of front pages about Britain’s “wide-open borders”. These stories are sparked by a coastguard’s interception of a boat of 18 Albanian asylum seekers off the coast at Dymchurch. It follows with the splash that the boat had been bought on eBay. The following day, by implication, we get an extrapolation of what this boat portends. The headline identifies “EU killers and rapists we’ve failed to deport” and details, in the manner of Trump and Mexico, that “thousands of violent thugs and rapists from the EU are walking Britain’s streets”, a number “equivalent to a small town” flooding in through Kent. The following week, we have our first view of Magwitch himself, Avni Metra, 54, who is surprised at his flat in Borehamwood in the proximity of a kitchen knife, and apparently wanted for murder two decades ago in Tirana. He is not alone: there is also the “one- legged Albanian double killer” Saliman Barci in Northolt. Though Albania and Kosovo (where the killers claim to come from) are not members of the EU, and it is not clear how leaving will do anything to prevent their arrival in Britain, the implication is clear.

5) How does the Daily Mail cover the issue of immigration? What representations are created in this coverage?

The Mail led with this immigration narrative on 17 of them. One exception was the grim morning of 17 June when Jo Cox’s murder made the front page. Her killer, Thomas Mair, was not a one-legged Albanian. Mair was, of course, a violently extreme advocate of “Britain first”. The Mail appeared anxious to relegate his shouted rage against the perceived evils of multicultural Britain to a side-issue, however. He was, their report emphasised, just a “loner with a history of mental illness”. The following day it reported that the police were investigating primarily not Mair’s far-right links in the targeting of Jo Cox for her pro-immigration views, but failures in the social services that led to his depression going untreated.

Factsheet 182 - Case Study: The Daily Mail (Part 3) Industrial Context

1) What do Curran and Seaton suggest regarding the newspaper industry and society?

Curran and Seaton suggest that have to reflect the needs and desires of the reader in order to maintain circulation and readership and that, technically, anyone should be able to set up a newspaper and that newspapers should maintain a liberal ideology. However, this assumption is wrong and an illusion because the press has been industrialised; ‘ordinary people’ would require substantial capital to establish a paper. The Internet has lowered these entry costs, however, the “the list of the ten most-visited sites is dominated by large news organisations like BBC News, the Guardian, The Times, The Sun and Telegraph.” This would suggest that the individual may have access to resources, but they will have difficulty reaching an audience without the power of the mass media industries.

2) What does the factsheet suggest regarding newspaper ownership and influence over society?

The independence of newspapers has been harmed due to these facts. It is not surprising that the editor or owner of a newspaper would have a big influence on the views and ideologies of the paper. For example, Rupert Murdoch in 2003 strongly wanted a war with Iraq and it is no coincidence that all of his 175 newspapers around the world that he owns supported this view in their articles.

3) Why did the Daily Mail invest heavily in developing MailOnline in the 2000s?

They came to notice that the readership figures for their newspaper were declining dramatically and that they needed a way to generate more readers and more profit.
"We are […] in the middle of a perfect storm of horrifically rising newsprint prices, disappearing classified revenues, diminishing display advertising, the rise of cannibalistic and parasitic Internet sites, the ubiquity of the frees and, now, most worryingly of all, readerships […] who have less and less disposable income to spend on newspapers.” (Dacre, 2008)

4) How does MailOnline reflect the idea of newspapers ‘as conversation’?

Newspapers transitioning to online has led them to be more of a conversation. This is because of the fact that people can engage with the articles online through comments and social media. This allows more views to be heard and people to debate with each other. 

5) How many stories and pictures are published on MailOnline?

The digital Daily Mail publishes around 1000 stories, but 10,000 pictures. The fact that there are so many pictures compared to stories illustrates how heavily MailOnline rely on visuals to tell their stories and attract an audience.

6) How does original MailOnline editor Martin Clarke explain the success of the website?

Clarke explains that “The reason MailOnline has become a success is because we cover the waterfront. It’s all the news you need to know, all the news you wanna know. The big stories. The lighter stories. The completely amazing stories." 

He suggests that it is all a competition for people's time and that readers look for something that is "engaging and interesting and fascinating – and as fun – as possible.”

7) How is the priority for stories on the homepage established on MailOnline?

Whichever story gets the most views. The stories that are on the homepage are there because they have a high click count; lots of people in the last 5 minutes read these stories so it’s highly likely that new readers arriving at MailOnline will want to read these as well.

8) What is your view of ‘clicks’ driving the news agenda? Should we be worried that readers are now ‘in control of digital content’?

To some extent, yes. Readers are clearly more interested in celebrity gossip or soft, useless news rather than the important politics and world affairs that will actually impact our lives. In the case of MailOnline, these important stories get sent to the bottom because they don't have as much views as the soft news. This means that people are becoming less and less aware of what is happening in the world around them and this is quite dangerous for society and the future.