Thursday 20 October 2016

Are the Daily Mail deliberately ridiculing their own readers?


The Daily Mail has been stirring up outrage and hatred about the fact that some of the tiny number of teenage refugees accepted into Britain look older than they are.

The idea of inciting hatred against refugees who look older than they are is bad enough in its own right, but to run a front page story inciting outrage about teenagers who look older than they are alongside a story that celebrates a 15 year old girl for looking older than she is and drools over her "sophistication" and "jaw dropping bone structure" is extraordinary stuff.

There seem to be two possible options here.

Either the Daily Mail editorial staff are so stupid that they were incapable of spotting the cognitive dissonance inducing juxtaposition of their hate campaign against old-looking teenage migrants next to a piece that drools all over a 15 year old girl for looking grown-up and sophisticated.

Or the Daily Mail editorial team are deliberately taking the piss out of their readership by juxtaposing the two things so they can have a good laugh about how Daily Mail readers are so damned stupid that they're completely immune to cognitive dissonance.

Show them pictures of foreign teenage boys who look older than their age and they'll seethe with xenophobic hatred, but  show them a pretty teenage girl who looks older than she is right next to the hate campaign and they'll get so hard over her that they'll fail to even spot the hypocrisy.

Either the Daily Mail staff are too thick to spot their own hypocrisy, or more likely they're deliberately taking the piss out of their readers by demonstrating that they can publish pretty much anything, no matter how tasteless or hypocritical, and their readers will continue to lap it up.


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