Is the editor of the Daily Mail the most dangerous man in Britain?

[Denzil_DC]

Under Paul Dacre’s 25-year reign, the paper has become the UK’s most fanatical anti-liberal voice. We trace its growing political influence through the past year’s headlines

by Tim Adams

...

May and June of last year was one of those times when news seemed to take on a narrative life of its own. The only parallel I could think of was in those last febrile weeks of Princess Diana’s life, when the frenzy of the tabloid press seemed to make a shocking ending inevitable and necessary. My colleague Carole Cadwalladr has indefatigably unearthed the ways that social media became a toxic tool of the Leave campaign. That effort only reinforced what was happening in plain sight, however. Rarely has there been a moment in British political life when newspapers – and, in particular, a single powerful newspaper – focused the thinking of its readers so effectively on one question. As Mark Twain observed, “There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.”

As we face another weird polling day that hardens surreality into fact, I’ve been reading through the front pages and editorials of the Daily Mail over the course of the last year, in sequence, as if they were a novel, or a blueprint for the nation we have become. It has not been a joyful experience. I began with the starting pistol to the referendum, and ended with “Crush the saboteurs” and wondered exactly how we had got here, and where we are heading next.

Chapter one of that story takes us back to last February and the critical moment when David Cameron returned from his negotiation with the EU ministers to present his gamble to the public. He came back from Brussels with predictably few new concessions but with a sense, reinforced by his gilded passage through political life, that he could charm both his cabinet and the Tory press on to his side.

...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/14/is-paul-dacre-most-dangerous-man-in-britain-daily-mail

[Dawson Leery]

1. kick

[MFM008]

2. i know

i troll the DU all the time...