The Daily Mail has been named as 2016 "Newspaper of the Year" by a bunch of mainstream media insiders. Their main justifications for this award were that the Mail "shaped the political agenda" (by propagandising for Brexit) and "reflected the temper of a large part of the country".
In this article I'm going to run through just a tiny fraction of the things that made the Daily Mail one of the most disgusting and contemptible news outlets in 2016.
Background
In case you are unaware of the basics, it's important to understand that the Daily Mail is an extreme-right propaganda outlet that is owned and operated by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth (or the 4th Viscount Rothermere if you're one of these subservient forelock tuggers who actually use people's aristocratic titles instead of their actual names).
Harmsworth has set himself up as a non-dom in order to avoid paying UK taxes, and he also controls his Daily Mail investment through a Bermuda based shell company called Rothermere Continuation Ltd. Both of these things mean that you really have to take the Daily Mail's extreme British nationalist jingoism with a shovel full of salt.
If Harmsworth really loved Britain then he'd stop pretending to be resident in France in order to avoid paying UK taxes wouldn't he? And he definitely wouldn't use a Bermuda based shell company to pretend that his Daily Mail profits are "overseas income" so as to avoid paying UK taxes on them.
Political killings
Within two weeks of the Jo Cox murder the Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges called for the Labour Party to "kill vampire Jezza".
Later in the year, when Jo Cox's killer was found guilty and sentenced, the Daily Mail published an article blaming immigrants for the murder that was actually carried out by one of their own demographic (low IQ, white supremacist, anti-refugee, Muslim-hating, extreme right-winger).
Staggering hypocrisy
When the Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs died the Daily Mail published a fawning front page farewell.
Back in 1938 when Andreas Siegfried Sachs arrived in the UK as a child refugee from Nazi Germany the Daily Mail was busy shrieking that the arrival of Jewish refugees was an outrage.
If the Daily Mail had've got their way in the 1930s, Sachs would have died a horrific death in a Nazi concentration camp instead of finding refuge in Britain and becoming a beloved comedy icon in his adopted nation.
Mocking their own readers
The fact that the fond front page farewell to the 1930s migrant Andrew Sachs was printed alongside a load of fearmongering anti-migrant rubbish strongly suggested that the Daily Mail editorial team are actively taking the piss out of their own readers.
Another example of this kind of piss-taking front page juxtaposition happened when the main Daily Mail headline shrieked about how child refugees from Syria look too old, while another section of the front page drooled over the 15 year old daughter of a supermodel for looking older than she is!
Supporting fascism
One of the most enjoyable Daily Mail articles to read of 2016 was the one where they cried bitter tears of sorrow over the loss of their favoured fascist candidate Norbert Hofer in the Austrian presidential election.
Of course Hofer wasn't the first Austrian fascist the Daily Mail fell in love with, they spent most of the 1930s telling their readers how wonderful Adolf Hitler was didn't they?
Attacking judges
Perhaps the most disgusting thing the Daily Mail did in 2016 was to launch a vitriolic "Enemies of the People" front page attack on three High Court judges for daring to do their jobs and stand up for the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Isn't it funny how Brexiters went from endlessly banging on about the importance of parliamentary sovereignty before the EU referendum, to yelling abuse at judges for daring to protect the principle of parliamentary sovereignty from Theresa May's autocratic ambitions after it?
More staggering hypocrisy
Just three months after their appalling "Enemies of the People" front page the Daily Mail published an extraordinary piece in which they decried the use of the term "Enemy of the People" as a Soviet propaganda used by the likes of Stalin and Lenin!
Undisguised homophobia
One of the worst elements of the Daily Mail attack on the High Court judges who ruled in favour of parliamentary sovereignty was the homophobic way in which they described one of the judges as "openly gay".
Another example of the Daily Mail's homophobia came when they (and their Metro subsidiary) rushed to report the completely fictional story that the New York pressure cooker bomber was a militant gay activist.
In 2016 the Daily Mail also publicly attacked a 15 year old Australian transgender boy and went into full-on outrage mode about a Transgender TV show.
The tide of undisguised Daily Mail homophobia in 2016 should come as no surprise to people who remember their previous output like their 1993 article celebrating the possibility of identifying gay genes so that parents could abort gay fetuses!
April Fools
Despite their open contempt for LGBT people the Daily Mail still fell for the Pink News April Fools article about the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doing a nude photo shoot for a gay magazine and published it on their website.
How far journalistic standards must have fallen if a newspaper that fell for an obvious April Fools prank and posted a lazily "churnalised" version of it on their website as actual news is the UK's "Newspaper of the year".
Being declared an unreliable source by Wikipedia
To top it all off the UK's "Newspaper of the Year" has recently been banned from Wikipedia as an unreliable source.
If standards at the Daily Mail are so low that they've been banned as an unreliable source by a website that can be edited by literally anyone with an Internet connection and they're our "Newspaper of the Year", what the hell does that say about standards of journalism at other British newspapers?
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