ANGRY MOB

There are two very unsavoury rape stories currently on the Daily Mail website. The first story is this: 'Boy, 13, who raped woman in front of his friends is jailed for just three years... because he said 'sorry'". The second story is this: 'First picture of teenager who sexually assaulted girl, 9, while on bail for raping 10-year-old'.

Clearly, both stories are horrific and you would expect the Daily Mail to cover them and for readers to assume that this is more evidence of New Labour's Broken Britain. You would also assume that both stories would have equal news value, although one story deals with a very young perpetrator, the other deals with the equally shocking aspect of the terribly young ages of the victims. However, one story makes the lead story of the Mail website, whilst the other story only makes a mention over half-way down the page - half the size and below the story: 'Living in Laa-Laa land? Man United star Gary Neville unveils plans for £8m 'Teletubby' eco-bunker built into a hillside'.

I think this can be explained when you realise that both of these awful stories are accompanied by a photograph of the perpetrators:

Naturally the white faced rapist is the one who doesn't make it halfway up the Daily Mail website - ironically he is placed next to another white faced sex offender. The brown faced rapist makes the lead story.

One of the problems with the Daily Mail website is their tendency to re-write headlines and articles whenever it suits them - without ever acknowledging that any changes have been made. This means that sometimes you get a headline next to a picture that doesn't seem to make much sense, like this for example:

So the headline and the blurb talks about the Tories, whilst showing a picture of BNP leader Nick Griffin with the 'BNP' logo clearly standing out. Is it that easy to confuse the Conservative Party with the BNP? Looking at the link to the article it seems clear that originally the article seemed to be about the Labour Party pandering to far-right voters:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196195/Labour-vows-Britons-council-house-queue-bid-win-voters-far-Right.html

The Daily Mail Reporter is what Daily Mail writers hide behind when they push boundaries of taste or sheer pointlessness beyond the pale even for a journalist that writes for such a turgid shit-heap of a newspaper. However, sometimes even the Daily Mail Reporter has to be reined in for headlines that are beyond the pale. Take yesterday for example, I was browsing the Mail website to see if anything was worth bothering with when I came across the following headline:

'Young girl 'starved to death by Muslim mother and step-father after being held captive for months'. Naturally my first thought is typical Mail for including the prefix 'Muslim' before mother to highlight that not only did a parent do something as horrific as this, but shock horror they just happen to be a Daily Mail bogeyman: a Muslim.

After a bit more browsing I returned to the same headline to write about it, but it just happened that the headline had now been changed - the Muslim prefix had been removed. I