Daily Mail

Location
Kensington, London
Politics
Right-wing. Jonathan Harmsworth, chairman and controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail & General Trust plc (DMGT), which publishes the Daily Mail, is a keen supporter of the Conservative Party.

Money Matters

The Daily Mail is published by the Daily Mail and General Trust’s (DMGT) subsidiary DMG Media, alongside its sister papers the Mail on Sunday and free urban publication Metro. DMGT operates diversified business in over 40 countries, which include property and energy analysis. In the year leading up to September 30, 2015, it reported revenue of £1.845 billion (US$2.782 billion) and an operating profit of £288 million ($434 million).

Mail businesses that include Mail newspapers, MailOnline and other continuing activities other than Metro, 7 Days, Wowcher and Elite Daily, saw the revenue tail off slightly during this period (£572 million), while its profits rose by 12 percent hitting £79 million.

With a decline in print advertising revenues, the operation’s focus has shifted towards Mail Online, which grew by 18 percent in the past financial year. DMGT also owns a 20 percent stake in Britain’s TV news producer ITN.

DMGT’s chairman and controlling shareholder Jonathan Harmsworth has non-domicile tax status and runs his media business through a Jersey trust and a Bermuda-registered offshore company, Rothermere Continuation Limited. Harmsworth, who Forbes estimates to be worth US$1.28 billion, has defended his ‘non-dom’ status on the grounds that his father spent most of his life in France.



DMGT is one of three companies that control over 70 percent of Britain’s newspaper market, according a Media Reform Coalition report. The other two firms are News UK, which owns the Sun and the Times, and the Daily Mirror’s publisher Trinity Mirror Plc. Media Reform Coalition argues the concentration of media associated with these companies threatens media plurality across the UK.

Essentials

The Daily Mail is a tabloid newspaper, which was founded by aristocrat Harold Sidney Harmsworth and his brother Alfred in 1896. Blue-blooded Harmsworth, who held the title 1st Viscount Rothermere, later gained notoriety as an admirer of the fascist Blackshirts, Hitler and Mussolini.

Viscount Rothermere is believed to have supported the Nazis, having had means to express his views through his media dynasty. Documents released in 2005 suggest that he met and corresponded with Hitler, and even congratulated him on the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

In September 2015 the Daily Mail’s average daily circulation was over 1.6 million copies, second only to the Sun. Its online division Mail Online is by far the UK’s most popular newspaper website, boasting 13.2 million unique global visitors each day in October 2015.

Some suggest the Daily Mail is more unashamedly polemical than inaccurate, publishing scaremongering eulogies on controversial topics such as migrants, political correctness, and the EU. However, others associate it with barefaced sensationalism, conservatism and racism.

Under Paul Dacre’s editorship, the tabloid has been accused of being "led by its opinions, not by news."

"Dacre wouldn’t really be interested in a story until he’d seen it somewhere else... [He] surveys all the other papers, selects the right lines for the next day and follows them," a former reporter told the New Statesman in 2014, adding that the tabloid is often described as "the day-late."

Key People

Paul
Dacre

Described as the "most successful and most feared newspaper man of his generation," Paul Dacre has been the Daily Mail’s editor since 1992. He is also editor-in-chief of DMG Media. Having received a staggering pay and bonus package of £2.4 million in 2014, Dacre is Britain’s best-paid newspaper editor. The 67-year-old’s handsome remuneration has seen him continue beyond the firm’s normal retirement age and reportedly almost matches that of Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail’s proprietor.

Dacre keeps a low profile, rarely making public appearances and often shunning interviews. While he reportedly refrains from befriending politicians, ex-Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown is thought to be an exception to this rule. Reflecting on Dacre’s relationship with Brown in 2013, BBC political editor Nick Robinson said it was "close," adding the Daily Mail editor was a regular guest at Brown’s "intimate family occasions."

Robinson also said Conservative and Labour politicians had long "screamed and shouted" about Dacre privately, but had never aired their frustrations publicly.

The Guardian once posed the question of whether Dacre was "the most dangerous man in Britain," noting his opinions "dominate the Mail’s worldview."



Although his views are socially conservative, his paper publishes damning reports and salacious gossip on politicians from across Britain’s political spectrum. In September 2015, the tabloid ran an article featuring an extraordinary allegation by an Oxford contemporary of David Cameron. The article, co-written by former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Michael Ashcroft and journalist Isabel Oakeshott, claimed the prime minister had been embroiled in «an obscene act with a dead pig» during his student years. The scandal provoked a media firestorm, and became known as ‘pig-gate’. It was merely one of many claims about Cameron’s university years that featured in Ashcroft and Oakeshott’s unauthorized biography of the PM, which was serialized in the Mail.

Controversies

A magnet for complaints

In 2014, press accountability campaign Hacked Off published a league table, which revealed the Daily Mail’s coverage had sparked more complaints than any other British national newspaper in 2013. The campaign had compiled the list by analysing data gathered by Britain’s Press and Complaints Commission (PCC).



The campaign described the press watchdog’s failure to publish such a league table as a "cover-up." The PCC had received over 1,200 complaints about the Daily Mail — almost twice as many as it received about the Sun. Editor Paul Dacre was the regulator’s Editors’ Code of Practice Committee chairman at the time, having occupied the position since 2008. But whether he influenced the way in which the PCC chose to present its annual complaint statistics remains unclear.

A list of publications responsible for editorial breaches between 2011 and 2013 compiled by the PCC also revealed that the Daily Mail was the worst offender. The tabloid and its website MailOnline had breached Britain’s Editors’ Code of Practice 47 times during this period.

The paper has retained its reputation as a magnet for complaints since the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) replaced the PCC in 2014.

The regulator requested the paper apologize for falsely accusing a woman of selling faulty electric goods to finance her plastic surgery last year and also demanded it apologize to an prison inmate it claimed had sought access to "gay pornography."

Some of the stories on celebrities that the Daily Mail has published, have cost it tens of thousands pounds in lawsuits.

Ed Miliband’s father scandal

The paper has been described as "immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, [and] gay-baiting" by Ed Miliband biographer, Al Jazeera presenter, and former HuffPost UK political director Mehdi Hasan.



The comments surfaced in 2013, after the tabloid was widely criticized for an article it published on Ralph Miliband, father of then-Labour leader Ed Miliband. In what has been dubbed as an attack on the fallen-Labour chief, the offending article claimed he had an "evil legacy," and called Miliband senior "the man who hated Britain." Some opponents were quick to remind the Daily Mail of the Nazi sympathies of 1st Viscount Rothermere, whose heir now owns the paper.

Accusations of racism

In the summer of 2015, the tabloid’s anti-migrant stance was compared to racist rhetoric it published almost 80 years ago. An article on Jews fleeing Germany, which was published in the paper in 1938, warned of "aliens...outrageously" entering Britain through the "back door." Critics say this discriminatory piece echoes the paper’s contemporary coverage of Europe’s refugee crisis.



In the aftermath of the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, a controversial cartoon by Stanley McMurtry (‘Mac’) featured in the Daily Mail. The image seemingly compared refugees and migrants seeking asylum in Europe to rats, and targeted the European Union’s open borders policy. The Daily Mail was accused of being "racist" and "xenophobic," but claimed it had "not received a single complaint from any reader" over the cartoon.





The paper is often accused of racism, with some critics arguing that it "rarely features black people except as criminals," and has style and fashion features that "are illustrated almost entirely by white faces and bodies." In 1997, it famously took a position on the case of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racially-motivated attack in 1993, by running a front page featuring the headline "Murderers." But the paper’s opponents said the move was just a smokescreen, insisting "the mainstream press, including the Daily Mail" were previously "openly hostile and suspicious" towards the deceased teen’s family.

Allegations of homophobia

A 1993 headline that read,"Abortion hope after ’gay genes’ findings," famously led to the paper being denounced as homophobic. Another Daily Mail article that provoked the same allegation was a story following the death of gay Irish pop star Stephen Gately. In 2009, on the eve of the celebrity’s funeral, the paper ran an article examining his lifestyle, which generated a torrent of criticism. Irate readers directed thousands of complaints at Britain’s press watchdog over the piece so rapidly, they reportedly crashed its site.

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