The Daily Mail upset by 'racist smears'

Most of the time, looking at the tabloids is a pain in the arse. Seriously, I don't know why I do it to myself. I wouldn't waste a single minute in real life listening in to some farting bore drone on about the same old cobblers day in, day out so quite why I do it here is anyone's guess.

Occasionally though, I come across stuff that makes me cackle with delight. It's a guilty cackle though, like when you laugh at someone tripping up the pavement. The hypocrisy of the Mail is often worth a chuckle, so much so that if you wrote a sitcom about a paper behaving the same way it'd fail because no audience would be able to suspend disbelief for long enough to believe in it.



This weekend, the Mail cracked me up with it's 'outrage' about Phil Woolas spreading 'racist smears'. One great thing is that in true Daily Mail fashion, that headline is wrong. Woolas was 'booted out' for telling lies about his opponent, not the racist smearing. When it was obvious that Woolas had been spreading racist smears but not that he'd been telling lies, he was given a position on the shadow front bench.

Obviously though, the real funny bit was the hypocrisy, covered already by Angry Mob, Minority Thought and Primly Stable. The Mail does the same sort of thing as Woolas all the bloody time.

In fact, as I said in 'Targeted: Phil Woolas goes for extremists' Woolas was actually copying tabloid techniques in his leaflets, so much so that he made one of them look like a tabloid newspaper. The 'Saddleworth and Oldham Examiner' emulates everything from the alliterative headline through doctored and out of context photos to creating false impression about violent Muslims that are only dispelled in the closing paragraphs. That the Mail's outrage comes just two days after the paper incited its own fear of three forlorn numpties with bits of paper, clumsily attempting to link them with the printer-cartridge bombers makes the whole thing even more funny.

So, does the Mail really now think that making stuff up and exaggerating about Muslims is 'racist' or 'shameful'?  Don't count on it.  Normal service will resume as soon as the paper gets a chance to spread its own shameful, racist smears.

Yet again, the Mail proves itself to be a spoiled, petulant child who's drunk too much Sunny D grassing up the other kids for playing a naughty game that he invented himself.