We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Why the tabloids are the choice of adults

The Daily Mail reports, EXCLUSIVE: Suicide bomber who died when his device blew up outside Liverpool hospital was pizza chef, 32, who fled Middle East and converted to Christianity at cathedral ‘he wanted to attack’ and was once arrested for carrying a knife

I was much taken by this comment from someone called “SorcerousSinner” on the normally left wing subreddit /r/ukpolitics:

The Daily Mail is the best news source for stuff like this because they have the least restraint and just publish all the info, and rumours. Footage of the killings. Fake news. Everything.

Broadsheet journalists are always concerned with carefully steering us, the dumb rabble, towards what they believe we should believe

So, the mail is the choice of adults who think they can handle the responsibility of getting all the info, possibly fake info.

36 comments to Why the tabloids are the choice of adults

  • bobby b

    Love the comment. He knows how to use “fake info” ironically. Just enough to make you wonder.

  • Phil B

    The Daily Mail always posts “Comments are closed” when it is a Muslim or an ethnic minority so you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out the perpetrator.

    Zip down to the comment section to save yourself the effort of reading the often inaccurate reporting (particularly when it involves Firearms and/or military equipment).

  • Shlomo Maistre

    Bendle, where art thou?

    We need someone to defend the indefensible “non-partisan” media hacks.

  • John

    He was a failed asylum seeker back in 2014 who was still living and working in the Uk.

    There must be a decent chance that his conversion to Christianity was a pretext to prevent deportation as an apostate.

  • Paul Marks

    The doctrine of Taqiyya (Islamic deception) is associated with Shia Islam, but it is also accepted by Sunni Islam.

    We must be clear what Taqiyya is NOT as well as what it is. Taqiyya is NOT a right for a Muslims or Muslims to deceive non Muslims for personal gain – certainly not. Taqiyya is limited to deception for the purpose of supporting Islam – for example Taqiyya is NOT a Muslim selling a non Muslim a substandard good or service telling them that it is excellent, but a Muslim pretending to be a Christian or a Jew or an atheist (even drinking alcohol and so on) is allowed if, and only if, it is done for the purpose of supporting Islam. Say for example, Christians were murdering Muslims – it would be allowed for a Muslim to pretend to be a Christian in order to both save their lives, and to help Muslims fight back when the time was right in the general world struggle-and-conflict.

    As for this case – we do not yet know if it was a case of Taqiyya or not. For all we yet know this man may just have been mentally ill.

  • Paul Marks

    As for the Daily Mail – I hated them during their support of Mrs May’s deal with the European Union (her effort to keep the entire United Kingdom under E.U. law – i.e. E.U. rule) – indeed an old “Tweet” of mine attacking the Mail were dug up by leftists during my little difficulty with “Central Office”.

    However, with the possible exception of the Daily Telegraph – the Daily Mail does give a more accurate (or less wildly inaccurate) account of the news than the broadsheet newspapers.

    The Daily Mail is also much better than the other tabloids.

  • APL

    Paul Marks: “For all we yet know this man may just have been mentally ill.”

    As the UK state now refuses to recognise religious motivation as a cause for a particular course of action. A surprisingly large number of Jihadi’s end up filed under ‘mentally ill’. They’ve gone through the ‘Prevent’ strategy ( a more useless expensive bondoogle it’d be difficult to concieve ) and come out the other side unchanged. We can usually identify this by the frequently used phrase “known to the authorities”.

    One interesting facet of the reporting in this case, the BBC explicetly stated that this guy was not known to MI5. Which I think and interesting variation on ‘known to the authorities’.

  • Snorri Godhi

    Is it fair to compare the Daily Mail to the New York Post?

    I have a look at the BBC front page every day, but otherwise read mostly articles at links on Instapundit or Samizdata.

  • According to the Wapping Liar the driver escaped serious injury thanks to the covidiocy inspired vinyl screen between him and the passenger part of the taxi. This is the sort of detail I’d have expected to see the Mail mention but it doesn’t seem to have for some reason

  • Lee Moore

    The Daily Mail (and in particular its online version) is easily the best news source in the English speaking world. They will steal stories from anyone, usually without attribution, they don’t believe in checking a story before publishing and their comment sections seem to be policed by normal humans (or perhaps nobody at all) rather than SJW-bots with a grievance. OK many many grievances.

    The result is a Jackson Pollock of news and fable – “the least restraint and just publish all the info, and rumours. Footage of the killings. Fake news. Everything” – just as SorcerousSinner said.

    Obviously being the best news source in the English speaking world at present is a VERY low bar. But as the commentators said during the surprisingly dull England goalfest against San Marino last night – you can only beat what’s in front of you.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    Lee Moore, I agree with what you said, both as to the Daily Mail being on average the best news source in the English speaking world at the moment, and as to that being a very low bar. However, as Snorri Godhi implied, under the editorship of Sohrab Ahmari (soon to end, if I recall correctly) the New York Post has become a pretty close competitor to the Daily Mail. I haven’t read the Post widely enough to know how often it is as bad as the Mail frequently is. But the NYP deserves honour for having broken the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and refusing to back down despite Twitter and Facebook’s scandalous censorship.

  • llamas

    Between the Daily Mail (remember what Sir Humphrey said) and Sky News Australia, two strong contenders for the title. In both cases, I don’t care so much that they may report stories with inaccurate details or incomplete facts, as that they report them at all. Vide half-a-hundred stories regarding US politics that they splash all over the front page, yet which are scarcely to be found in US media. They are the canaries in the coal mine, not the gas chromatographs.

    llater,

    llamas

  • I have a sneaking fondness for the New York Post myself. I might read the Daily Mail more often, but I use an ad blocker and they don’t like that. Between the two, it’s a choice of more involved vs. less involved.

  • Jonathan Bailey

    Ask the Men In Black how good the tabloids are………….

    https://youtu.be/duA5eWjHCjU

  • Paul Marks

    APL – interesting.

    Yes the authorities refuse to accept that Islam contains any troubling doctrines (which makes “Prevent” of doubtful value). So, as Islam is entirely good, someone who claims to have committed an act of violence for Islam must have either radically misinterpreted Islam, or be insane.

    “But we can explain matters to the authorities” – if anyone is thinking that, I would strongly advice them NOT to try. The British (and American) authorities now have a set of positions, on many subjects, which are NOT open to dissent. Indeed dissent (questioning) leads to punishment.

  • There must be a decent chance that his conversion to Christianity was a pretext to prevent deportation as an apostate. (John, November 16, 2021 at 7:16 am)

    There is indeed.

    Of course, if this were a TV episode (with scriptwriters not so woke as to make the inevitable denoument be that he was murdered by a white supremacist taxi-driver), then superb forensic work half-way through the episode would reveal that the pizza chef was a genuine convert, murdered by Al Qaeda terrorists (who skilfully framed him as the bomber by using remote control) both to punish his apostasy and to distract the security services from the real bomb, found at the last minute minus one.

    That’s one reason why ‘all the news – including fake’ is a good paradigm. There are things that cannot be called impossible early in an investigation, and that (very rarely) could be true in real life, not just in convolutedly-plotted fiction.

    However John’s less convoluted idea is a great deal more probable – and will have occurred to enough people that I anticipate pre-emptive push-back against it from the usual suspects in the usual outlets making the usual accusations against anyone so wicked as to think it.

    I have a sneaking fondness for the New York Post myself. I might read the Daily Mail more often, but I use an ad blocker and they don’t like that. (Ellen, November 16, 2021 at 4:08 pm)

    I give non-ad-blocking clicks to the DM, the New York Post and other sites whose absence I, like Natalie, would regret.

  • CaptDMO

    Seems like The Daily Mail is a peer to The NY Post.

  • Some time ago I entered this into my long-ago created Quote file (which was once a Fortune Cookie file on a PDP 11/70).

    The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country, the Financial Times is read by people who own the country, the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is. Sun readers don’t care who runs the country so long as she has big tits.

    Not sure who the quote is from, but I kept it so I knew which UK paper to read. Well, those and Guido Fawkes’s blog.

  • Shlomo Maistre

    Matthew H Iskra,

    If I may add slightly to that fun, if only somewhat accurate, quote:

    Daily Express is read by people who ought to run the country.

  • I will add that to my quote, Shlomo Maistre.

    Huh. I have 8 quotes from Samizdata.net in my file. Not bad. It helps that you people make a point of finding good quotable lines.
    2 from Paul Marks
    2 from Perry de Havilland
    The rest by Erol Bayburt, Kid du Toit, Perry Mtzger, and some others, and now one from you.

  • The Pedant-General

    It’s memorably from “Yes, Prime Minister”:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    Mr Iskra, your quote is from this scene in “Yes, Minister”.

    Edit: As The Pedant-General said literally one minute before I did.

  • Jim

    “According to the Wapping Liar the driver escaped serious injury thanks to the covidiocy inspired vinyl screen between him and the passenger part of the taxi. This is the sort of detail I’d have expected to see the Mail mention but it doesn’t seem to have for some reason”

    This is Liverpool we are talking about. The place where ordinary shops have razor wire on top of their roofs and steel shutters on every opening to try and prevent the locals ‘liberating’ the stock. I fully expect that most taxis already had some sort of barrier between driver and driven pre-covid for all manner of self defence and anti-theft purposes………would you like to drive around Liverpool at night picking up drunken Scouse scallies without some sort of serious protective screen between you (and your takings for the evening) and them? Personally I’d want some ballistic grade plastic between me and the locals, covid would be the least of my worries.

  • Flubber

    The church ran a programme called Pray to Stay

  • Shlomo Maistre

    So this just dropped.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IRyjNDVv3s

    One live podcast featuring Joe Rogan, Blaire White, Tim Pool, Michael Malice, Alex Jones, Luke Rudkowski and more all discussing the Fake News Media.

    This is just unreal. Did the internet just break?

  • Shlomo Maistre

    This podcast is just phenomenal.

  • APL

    Jim: “I fully expect that most taxis already had some sort of barrier between driver and driven pre-covid for all manner of self defence and anti-theft purposes”

    It also looked like one of those new model ‘black’ taxis. They come pre segregated between the rear passenger compartment and the driver.

    So yea, it was a lie that the ‘COVID’ screen was a thing, but it was also a lie that the ‘COVID screen’ saved the driver, too. If that Jihadi had known how to manufacture a pipe bomb other than a very large firecracker**, no screen between him or the driver would have saved the driver.

    By the way, in my initial viewing of the situation, the passenger seems to emerge from the back of the taxi first and runs off to the left toward the doors of the building behind. The driver exits the burning taxi some seconds later from the front drivers side.

    **I guess this guy really wasn’t know to MI5.

  • Albion's Blue Front Door

    No doubt The Mail has many faults, and my wife for one dismisses it–yet she reads it. In a way, you can’t comment on any printed master until you have read it. Oddly, that is one of the things the lefties love to do: they know all about some book or article or publication having never read it.

    But as noted above, The Mail does cram an awful lot of news stories on its website and for all I know in its paper pages. I stopped reading newspapers long time ago, but then I used to work in the business so I know something of how the journalists used to think and it didn’t inspire me. I suspect it has all got a lot worse since back in the day.

  • Oddly, that is one of the things the lefties love to do: they know all about some book or article or publication having never read it.

    Very true. Many classical liberals/libertarians have read Capital. Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto etc. Very few on the ‘left’ have read the Future and It’s Enemies, Human Action or Road to Serfdom etc.

  • Sam Duncan

    Ooh, the Mail won’t like being called a tabloid. “Compact quality”, if you please. 🙂

    (Of course, technically they’re all tabloids now. Are there any daily broadsheets left?)

  • Lee Moore

    Perry : Very true. Many classical liberals/libertarians have read Capital. Little Red Book, Communist Manifesto etc. Very few on the ‘left’ have read the Future and It’s Enemies, Human Action or Road to Serfdom etc.

    Very few on the left have read Capital, Little Red Book or the Communist Manifesto either.

  • Lee Moore

    That joke about who reads what newspapers is way older than Yes, Minister.

    I heard it at school in the 1970s and thought it was good enough to try on my Dad. Who laughed, but not because the joke is a sidesplitter but because it was an old joke even then. I think the bit about big tits in the Sun may have been a 1970s additon to a more ancient joke.

  • Zerren Yeoville

    Sam Duncan: Are there any daily broadsheets left?

    The Daily Telegraph is the only remaining national daily newspaper in the UK that still publishes in broadsheet format, the last holdout against a trend that began in 1990 with the short-lived Sunday Correspondent.

  • Paul Marks

    It turns out that the “Christian convert” attended a Mosque every day.

  • staghounds

    You know those Unitarians with that many mansions stuff.

  • John

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10215949/Poppy-Day-suicide-bomber-local-mosque-day-day-Ramadan.html

    Correct Paul. Yet another story published by the Daily Mail but ignored by the mainstream media who remain fixated on Conservative MPs and British-Asian cricketers (although both will now be dropped in favour of the Rittenhouse acquittal).