There’s been too much flak flying between the Mail and the Guardian these past few weeks, too much choleric introversion guaranteed to turn ordinary readers off. But a few relatively benign points from these exchanges deserve pondering.
The Mail, in a mammoth editorial, declares that the Guardian knows that Katie Hopkins “has nothing to do with the Daily Mail, but works for Mail Online – a totally separate entity that has its own publisher, its own readership, different content and a very different world view”. In short, Paul Dacre, titular editor-in-chief of everything around the Kensington atrium, now cedes complete autonomy to hard-driving Mail Online editor Martin Clarke.
Hopkins throwing another wobbly? Nothing to do with me, guv. It’s them over there what causes all the trouble.
Welcome to tangled web territory, where the “totally separate” Online operation starts its working day with dozens of print Mail stories and columns. And where – only last month – Ipso tried to sort out whether a legal letter (from Gina Miller, valiant campaigner) sent to Dacre’s office should have prompted Clarke to do something under a cluster of changing rules.
It’s at least a little puzzling when the National Readership Survey, measuring total UK news eyeball deployment for the benefit of ad agencies, puts the Daily Mail/Mail Online top with 31.1 million UK readers a month: 9.1 million print, 7.7 million on PC and 22.7 million via mobile; with the Sun just behind on 28.8 million; and the Mirror third with 26.1 million.
The Sun’s website is pure Bun. The Mirror’s is a sprightly extrapolation of the print version. Both are forerunners of what may transpire if print dies a lingering death and all we have left is the online memory. That’s transition, the supposed formula for eternal journalistic life. (See the online-only Indy now racking up 19 million readers.)
But what price the transition factor as and when the Daily Dacre turns into the Daily Clarke, with its different content and own world view? Logically, there is no transition here. If one day the earth closes over the print version, there will be no Daily Mail as we know it left. Success today – and disappearance tomorrow? Transition factor: zero.
No flak flying, as I say. No running down of the Daily D and the Daily C with their various claims to success. But, nevertheless, a difference that views the Mail empire in a “totally separate” light: one where the present is going full bat and the future will have to take care of itself.
FO must ride to Al Jazeera defence
Some 21 years ago the Middle East got al-Jazeera Arabic, its first TV news channel that truly understood professionalism and independence. Then it got al-Jazeera English, a notably vital voice in reporting and explaining events to a troubled world. But today, in a macabre development, Saudi Arabia and Egypt lead a bloc of nations threatening a blockade of Qatar unless, among other things, it closes al-Jazeera.
It’s a macabre joke of a demand, the echoing voice of repression. Surely the Foreign Office can’t duck this one. Come on, Boris, you’re a journalist: even you can’t pussyfoot over Riyadh now.
