The Daily Mail have a habit of openly mocking the gullibility of their own readers. There's no other explanation for stuff like the front page juxtaposition of a glowing farewell to the German-born German immigrant Andrew Sachs with a bellowing anti immigrant headline, or the whinging about refugee children who don't look their age right next to a picture celebrating a 15 year old girl for looking as attractive as her mother! They're clearly testing the cognitive dissonance immunity of their readership as some kind of office prank.
When it comes to the Question Time woman who said she decided to vote Leave at the last minute because she saw a straight banana in Lidl, there's plenty of room for ridicule. It's hard enough to understand how someone could make such an important decision based on the shape of a sodding banana, but to actually admit such a ludicrous thinking process on television ... well ... it's so easy that it's actually a bit cruel to jeer at such a silly person.
Someone who took great delight in jeering at the EU banana woman was the Daily Mail hack Amie Gordon who trawled Twitter looking for jokes and parody accounts based on the incident. "Let's all laugh at the gullibility of the EU banana woman" was the tone of the article, but it's not so long since Amie Gordon was actually pushing the bendy banana myth for all it was worth.
Tabloid hacks who work for billionaire propaganda barons like Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail, Metro), Rupert Murdoch (The S*n, Times, Sky), the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) and Richard Desmond (Express, Star) are not stupid. Far from it. Their job is to put a hard-right interpretation on the news of the day, and in most cases write it in the vocabulary of a primary school child so that the gullible and uneducated can rote learn what they've said and adopt it as their own political opinions, which is not as easy as it sounds.
These aren't stupid people, but they are cynical and self-serving as they come. In their hearts they must know that spreading so much hate and so many lies on behalf of tax-dodging extreme-right sociopaths has an extremely negative toxifying effect on society, but they feel that they have to do it, otherwise they'd be out of their jobs.
Apparently the way they have learned to cope with the disgust they must feel at the way they've sold out their journalistic integrity for a bit of filthy lucre is to have a jolly good laugh by ridiculing the gullibility of their own readers. "Ha ha ha" they must chortle, "we told them to be angry about bendy bananas and some of them were daft enough to actually vote out of the EU because of it". "Let's write an article ripping the piss out of them for taking the shit we write at face value. Ha ha ha, the stupid gullible idiots"!
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