- By Heena Patel
“Stop Funding Hate” backlash against the tabloids
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Stationary brand, Paperchase has bowed to pressure from campaigners and committed to no longer advertising in the Daily Mail.
The move has upset all the right people it would seem. Britain’s tabloids are notoriously among the most hateful and vicious in the world often called “tabloid trash” or “rags” colloquially in the Uk.
They have long dictated what is deemed politically permissible, rallying behind right wing policies and ideas, individuals and movements, such as Brexit.
One of their key roles has been to deflect anger at injustice away from the powerful vested interests at the top, to scapegoats instead: immigrants, refugees, public sector workers, benefit claimants, celebrities, activists, you name it.
Now Paperchase has apologized for advertising in the Daily Mail, the paper has since accused the company of having “allowed itself to be bullied into apologizing”. For the Daily Mail to accuse anyone of bullying reveals an intriguing lack of self-awareness, to say the least. This paper, whose less than glorious history includes cheerleading for the Nazis according to an article published earlier this month in The Guardian about hate speech in the media. It denounced judges ruling there should be parliamentary oversight of Brexit as “Enemies of the people”, a term you might expect to be bandied around by a totalitarian regime.
But there is a wider story here. The power of the far right press is in a death spiral. It once believed it could dictate election results; during the general election, it did indeed pour unprecedented vitriol on a Labour party it tried to legitimize as terrorist-loving, communist, extremists. What happened? Forty per cent of the electorate voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s party and deprived the Tories of their majority.
The tabloids’ online influence is not growing enough to make up for falling print sales. The average age of a Daily Mail reader is 58, while a younger generation emerges that is well disposed to Corbynism and increasingly hostile to the sort of bigotry peddled by these rags. However, sadly, an overwhelmingly high number of 25-50 year old readers still fall for the far from accurate and at times our right made up bull s**t that the right wing British mass media peddles for extortionate profits. In a 2016 pole, 80% of a 100’000 strong sample of British tabloid readers said that if an individual is accused of a crime in a newspaper that they read, they believe they are guilty, even if a court finds them innocent or the case is dropped. The trash rags use this brain dead mentality to bully and blackmail powerful threats to their ideas into silence at times.
Pizza Hut apologizes for advertising with the Sun
Pizza Hut has used it’s Twitter account to publicly apologize “for any offence caused” by advertising in the Sun and Sunday.
“The aim of this offer was simply to give our customers the chance to enjoy a free pizza to share with their family and friends.”
The Sun claimed “this is not a Paperchase moment”. Although, Stop Funding Hate were also behind the campaign that saw Pizza Hut fall out with the tabloid. Famously there was outrage when the Sun published a front page falsely claiming 1 in 5 British Muslims was a terrorist supporter.
The paper was burned in the thousands with videos going viral on social media of people burning enormous stacks of the paper.
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