It’s a fair question to ask: lots of complaints made over Jan Moir’s piece on the death of Stephen Gately, none upheld.
However, as Enemies of Reason points out, that isn’t the only measure of success:
But I would like to hope – hope against hope – that the storm the Daily Mail found itself in after Moir’s ill-judged and venomous article made them, in some small way, feel they were a little more vulnerable to the outside world, and their own readers, than they were before. It’s easy to dismiss the rantings of a few pointless troublemakers like me, for example, but when it’s several thousand people, and several thousand readers, that’s a different matter.
It’s worth pointing out here that the immediate swipes at Stephen Gately just hours after he had died were not a one-off. The Mail had previously delighted in the disappearance of TV presenter Mark Speight, gleefully poring over his personal life and allowing reader comments to insult him while he was missing and, as it turned out, suicidal. Missing chef Claudia Lawrence has had her personal life intruded into, also, supposedly in the public interest – though I fail to see how. The message has always been ‘Don’t let the corpse get cold’, although it’s also important to say that the Mail are by no means the only offender when it comes to this kind of behaviour.
Today, after the death of Kristian Digby, the Mail’s article is calm and respectful.
Things didn’t quite stay that way, but go and read the post and comments for the full story.
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19 Comments
This matters to the extent that Twittering young urban liberals are “readers” of the Daily Mail. I doubt they are readers in the sense that they buy the newspaper and contribute to its income stream. They may be readers in the sense that they read articles that their friends disagree with and are offended by, so that they can participate in the group offence at something they would never normally read except to be offended. However, that’s not a group that matters to the Daily Mail if it is alienated.
Even if we don’t read the Daily Mail in it’s print form and contribute to it’s distribution income we do read it online and contribute to it’s online advertising (even if we don’t click on the link, thus activating the greater financial reward for the paper).
Having said that, I have noticed that in two Telegraph articles today on Kristian Digby they have written “Mr Disgby, who was homosexual…” and I just thought “why”? I mean, they could have written, with just as much effect, “Mr Digby, who was dyslexic…” because he made a program about the difficulties of overcoming his abject terror of reading too.
As to the PCC and Jan Moir though, I meant to comment at the time the PCC decision was announced but somehow the moment passed. But since it has been raised here, I will now.
I wonder if we actually have any “right” to redress or complain. The PCC has proven itself pretty toothless all along, except, perhaps, where royals have been concerned in brokering “deals” about the Windsor sons’ privacy and so on.
And I just think perhaps now that well, the Daily Mail is private property; maybe they have a perfect right to print whatever they like for their audience. And that it is customer disappointment or customer outrage, or perhaps their advertisers, that is the only thing that should matter, and then because those people are sufficiently outraged to make an impact on the paper’s circulation and profit in a show of disgust.
We do not, in my opinion, have a “right” to a “reputation” You could argue that the media are so powerful in this country and the world perhaps in general that if they do succeed in getting their small minded readership to believe their crap that it is tremendously difficult for someone to respond and put “their side” in a similarly well read response.
But for 25,000 of us to feel the right to “complain” to an outside body and expect some action to be taken is just wrong. We have no such right. Personally I had a great big soft spot for both of these lovely young men, and it did gall to see what Jan Moir wrote about Gately, but she’s entitled to her opinon and the Mail is entitled to publish it, and tha’s, in a word, tough.
Having heard the Today programme collectively salivating, in the most odious way possible, about Jon Venables this morning, I’d say the message hasn’t got across at all.
“Having said that, I have noticed that in two Telegraph articles today on Kristian Digby they have written “Mr Disgby, who was homosexual…” and I just thought “why”? I mean, they could have written, with just as much effect, “Mr Digby, who was dyslexic…” because he made a program about the difficulties of overcoming his abject terror of reading too.”
Considering he’s being reported to have died in a “sex game gone wrong” I don’t think it’s surprising that his sexuality is being mentioned.
Yeah – the first article was before any of that came out though. The second article was a repeat of the first but with an extra paragraph or two at the top about the speculation of auto-erotic asphyxiation. So I don’t think that absolves them entirely.
“Considering he’s being reported to have died in a ‘sex game gone wrong’ I don’t think it’s surprising that his sexuality is being mentioned.”
Considering it’s being described as a solo s*x game, I don’t see what his sexual orientation has to do with it at all. (Unless you think heterosexuals never play s*x games?)
[Usual bloody problems getting any sort of comment through the spam filter on a subject like this.]
Jock
But for 25,000 of us to feel the right to “complain” to an outside body and expect some action to be taken is just wrong. We have no such right. Personally I had a great big soft spot for both of these lovely young men, and it did gall to see what Jan Moir wrote about Gately, but she’s entitled to her opinon and the Mail is entitled to publish it, and tha’s, in a word, tough.
Yes, I agree. When I saw all the fuss made about this article originally I thought the article must be full of anti-homosexual abuse, but when I finally read it after the PCC’s decision, I found it wasn’t what the fuss had led me to believe it might be.
It was an expression of opinion, some suggestions as to what might have gone on, but nothing factually incorrect. It expressed disapproval of a lifestyle some find glamorous, but the author of the article felt was rather sad. Well, we are all entitled to our opinion. Yes, it was published just after this person’s death, which is not nice, but on the other hand, when else is one going to comment on lifestyles and sad deaths? It wouldn’t be news if it were published today, would it?
One may question the extent to which certain views find it easier to get published in the national media than others, and to which commentators in the national media tend to come from certain backgrounds and to have certain points of view. I do not think, however, there is any shortage of openings for people to put forward liberal views on drugs and homosexuality. Jan Moir was hounded because what she wrote did not fit in with liberal orthodoxy. Someone who wrote an article which was on the side of liberal orthodoxy, but was nastily critical of someone who wasn’t, and as such attracted an organised mob of protestors 25,000 strong, would have been regarded as a hero in these columns, and Lib Dem bloggery would have been full of articles praising the person and standing up for free speech and condemning those protestors as enemies of free speech.
In short, I am appalled by the hypocrisy that has surrounded this article and the reaction to it. It seem many people here are in support of free speech so long as it is free speech they agree with. They will cheer on the closing down, by mob action, of free speech which expresses views they disagree with.
Malcolm
Yes, I was half expecting someone to say that.
But if someone dies in a sex game, are you really suggesting it’s improper for a newspaper to comment on their sexual activities in general? Frankly, I think that’s ridiculous.
Delighted to dangle in your trap, Anthony. But I never said anything about ‘improper’. It’s just irrelevant — and irrelevant mentions of personal characteristics that are viewed negatively by many people in the target audience can reasonably be regarded as motivated by a desire to denigrate.
Matthew:
I reckon that’s twice in as many weeks. If it weren’t Lent I’d declare a red letter day!
Malcolm:
Of course they don’t: for them it is deadly serious…:)
Malcolm
So you aren’t saying the comment was “improper”, but you are saying it could reasonably be construed as an attempt to “denigrate” Kristian Digby, in a report of his death.
I must say that doesn’t make much sense to me.
Hywel ap Dafydd, you may be right that the Daily Mail cares about online advertising. Would you have read the Daily Mail website that day if it weren’t for an article that your friends were offended by? If not, then this sort of protest encourages the Daily Mail to print articles that people like Twittering young urban liberals will be offended by, because it increases online revenue without reducing sales revenue.
Anthony
Depends what you mean by “improper”. I’ve no idea what it means to you, so I explained on what basis I think the comment about whassname’s homosexuality could be reasonably interpreted as unreasonable (so to speak). If that’s what ‘improper’ means to you, then fine: it was improper; but I was going for analysis rather than labelling.
So you are in fact saying that you think it’s unreasonable (or could be “reasonably interpreted as unreasonable”) in reporting that someone has died (allegedly) in these circumstances, to mention that he is homosexual.
I can only repeat that that’s ridiculous. When someone dies in these circumstances, his sexual circumstances are obviously relevant. If Digby had been heterosexual, of course you’d expect the report to say whether he was single, married, separated, divorced or whatever.
Clearly some double standards here. ‘homosexual’ is not a point on the same scale as ‘single, married, separated, divorced’. Can you think of an occasion when you’ve seen the words ‘who was a heterosexual’ appended to the name of someone whose death is being reported? And did this report mention whether Digsby was ‘single, married (or in a civil partnership’, or whatever?
Look, it’s not a huge point – nobody’s screaming for the Telegraph to be banned or boycotted (well, not on the basis of this report anyway…), or suggesting that this remark in the article is ‘hate speech’ or Moir-level nastiness – it’s just (probably) a reflex of prurient disapproval; so if you want the last word, go ahead and have it – I’ve said all I need to on the subject.
“Can you think of an occasion when you’ve seen the words ‘who was a heterosexual’ appended to the name of someone whose death is being reported? And did this report mention whether Digsby was ’single, married (or in a civil partnership’, or whatever? “
I can only repeat, if anyone died as the result of a ‘s£x game’ I think reports of their death would normally include enough detail of their sexual circumstances to make it clear what their sexual orientation was. Though admittedly the phrase “who was a heterosexual” isn’t commonly used, because most people are, so it’s usually a kind of default assumption.
The Telegraph report I saw earlier mentioned him having a boyfriend, though it has been revised since then, and that reference has now gone.
Edward
Your right in that I probably would never have read the article if it hadn’t been for the online media storm it produced. However thanks to a significant change in how I (and many others) now digest the content of the print media i.e. via feed sites and links to their online format, I have found myself regularly reading articles from the Daily Mail family of newspapers as well as voting in their online polls. While
Furthermore you wrote;
“They may be readers in the sense that they read articles that their friends disagree with and are offended by, so that they can participate in the group offence at something they would never normally read except to be offended.”
The irony of a newspaper which has long used such methods to demonise individuals and groups becoming itself the victim of such an act is not lost on me.
One disturbing consequence of the migration of printed content to the WWW is the bile people will write on comments sections of articles under the illusion of anonymity. I have to admit that in reading some of the comments I found on Jan Moir’s original article I found myself equally disgusted with my fellow objectors; “urban liberals” they were not!