For me the thing that came to mind when I heard about the Daily Mail's moral crusade against the late Ralph Miliband was their headline in the days after the first of the 2010 leaders' debates in which Nick Clegg did rather well:
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| Possibly the greatest Daily Mail front page ever? |
Like the attack on Ralph Miliband this represents the paper in knee jerk attack mode struggling to respond to a change in circumstances. And the circumstances are remarkably similar: a politician they oppose has had a good run of press and changed the conversation at least temporarily. The Mail needs to do something, anything to shut down the new narrative of Labour or Lib Dem success which means it has to be loud, attention grabbing and outrageous. And preferably involve the Nazis. The Daily Mail's go to position is basically to prove Godwin's law wherever possible.
Godwin's law, for those of you who are new to the internet, is that as any internet discussion goes on, the chances of someone invoking Hitler or the Nazis to prove their point approach 100%. This person is commonly deemed to have lost the argument because invoking the Nazis is so lazy and shows a complete unwillingness to engage with the substance of the argument.
The most common form of this is "Hitler / the Nazis supported policy X, therefore policy X is evil" and the tabloids do it quite often, particularly when referring
to EU issues. When it comes to Ed Miliband the Mail appears to have decided that Hitler is too on-the-nose so they use
Stalin instead but the basic point is still there.
Tabloid attacks work by going after the messenger rather than the message, to use a sports analogy they play the man not the ball, pumping out headline after headline with the subliminal message that "he thought the Nazis were good so how can you trust anything he says".
Occasionally they overplay their hand, as The Sun did with the case of Jacqui Janes, the mother of a fallen
soldier to whom Brown had written a badly spelt letter of condolence, but normally it's much more subtle.
What tabloids try to do is establish a particular viewpoint as "normal" and crucify or ridicule any view which falls outside that view. Criminal justice is a good example of this where "normal" is harsh punishments, particularly of things that offend "decency" and middle class sensibilities and any other approach, regardless of the merits, results or practicality, is plainly ridiculous and bizarre.
When The Sun switched from Labour to the Conservatives in 2009, I read a piece saying that the real effect of this would not be something as blunt as The Sun saying "vote Conservative" (though they did that) but the relentless and ongoing portrayal of Labour and Gordon Brown in the worst possible light over the period of a year and using the power that newspapers still have to set the news agenda to promote issues and stories which showed the government in a bad light. The effective part wasn't their actual election coverage or their Obama-like front page of David Cameron but the fact that they had spend most of a year beforehand defining "normal" on terms favourable to the Conservatives and unfavourable to Labour.
Newspapers divide themselves between the "news" and "opinion" sections but one of the first things I realised when I had a paper round as a schoolboy was that the opinion section is really the entire paper.
