ANGRY MOB

The Daily Mail is a tabloid newspaper. It generates its profit by selling advertising space in their printed and online editions, as well as charging a nominal fee for the paper. Therefore, as a business venture it is important for the Mail to sell as many copies as possible, as the more copies sold, the greater the advertising revenue. Subsequently, when you start to analyse the news values and style of the Mail (or any other paper) you have to consider that the principle motivation for style, tone and content is profit.

The Mail has a circulation of over 2 million every day, making it one of the largest selling newspapers in the world, so its style, tone and content must have a broad appeal. However, popularity in itself is not a sign that the Mail is producing quality journalism, merely that it knows its target audience.

In order to assess the news values of the Mail I have taken a fairly standard Mail story: 'Tortured toddler's 107 injuries: Mother and lover jailed over tragic girl's month of 'unbelievable' agony' [print article, scan here], and analysed the tone, style and content of the piece and contrasted it with the same story as covered by the Times [print article, scan here].

The Times reports the story in a factual and sober manner, whilst the Mail reports the story in a sensational manner. Big bold type font for the headline that straddles two pages, the underlining of the number and the bold and underlined sub-heading for the Mail in contrast to the smaller, less emotive headline in the Times – with no emotive sub-heading. The Mail headline uses alliteration, and the very emotive phrase ‘tortured’ to describe the toddler. The actual news reported – the mother and partner being jailed yesterday – is relegated to the sub-heading. This can be seen as inverting the tradition of the news story forming the headline, whilst the sub-heading provides further information. The Times headline gives a brief summary of the news story without any emotive language, mentioning the 107 injuries, but contextualising them as the reason for the arrest of the parents, rather than making them stand alone as a headline as the Mail chooses.

The Mail uses clichés – ‘tragic’ and ‘fate was sealed’, ‘lifeless body’ – alongside emotive language such as ‘agony’, ‘systematically beaten’, ‘murder’. Whereas the Times language is factual, and any statement about the nature of the incident is left up to those who dealt with the case: Judge Peter Thornton, QC and Detective Inspector Trevor Gasson. They provide minimal details of the position of social services and Kirklees Council, but make no implications or speculations regarding whether more could have been done – simply stating that a ‘serious case review had been ordered’.

The Mail on the other hand speculates that social services failed to identify any problems on 3 visits during the period the child was being ‘systematically beaten’. They also state that the ‘murder raises further questions about the actions of Kirklees social workers’ and reminds readers that the same council had been criticised in the Shannon Mathews case. This explicit linking of the two cases further implies that the council deserves criticism for this death, and that the two are not isolated incidents – pointing towards a greater failing of social services.

The Times provides a summary of the news story through short factual paragraphs interjected with the judgement of Judge Thornton and the conclusions of Detective Inspector Gasson. The Mail on the other hand, whilst littering the article with the comments of Judge Thornton and ending the article with the statement from Detective Inspector Gasson, provide a lot more morbid details. For example, they describe the cupboard in which the child was locked (‘tiny handprints and bloodstains were found inside’), they describe the child being dumped in a bin (‘as her mother looked on’) and they go into detail describing the results of the post-mortem examination.

The Mail also uses a much more voyeuristic and arguably moralistic (judgemental) tone than the Times. For example, the Mail describes how Navsarka was ‘spotted’ by Anwar, from which point on the child’s ‘fate was sealed’. That Navsarka was ‘spotted’ by Anwar makes the mother passive; whilst Anwar becomes the predator – it is his action alone here that seals the fate of the child. The content is voyeuristic; the implications of prey and predator are encouraging readers to make moral judgements about the two protagonists. Anwar is again portrayed as predatory in the next sentence; he ‘chatted her up’, although how would the Mail know exactly how this encounter took place?

The final two lines juxtapose the couple having sex (after just meeting) with the death of the ‘little girl’: ‘later that day the couple had sex in the back of the shop while Sanam sat in a pushchair nearby. Within three months the little girl was dead.’

It could be argued that juxtaposing death and sex subconsciously (or perhaps consciously) creates a moralistic link between the two. The Mail have already stated that it was the attraction Anwar felt towards a ‘pretty single mother’ that sealed the child’s fate – and of course, there is ambiguity about who is to blame, Anwar, for spotting Navsarka, or Navsarka for being a ‘pretty single mother’. Furthermore, being described as a single mother also implies that she is partly to blame, as if she had not been a single mother (and subsequently prey to such a predator) then this would never have happened. The moralistic link between the illicit and sordib description of sex and the subsequent death of the child is perhaps even trying to create a post hoc argument (post hoc ergo propter hoc – ‘after this, therefore because of this’); at the very least it seems a non sequitur (‘it does not follow’).

Whilst this may seem to be over-analysing the article it must still be considered a valid interpretation as the writer constructed the article in this way. The author chose to include these details; he chose to put these two ideas together - as if they were somehow intimately linked. It must also be considered that the Times did not feel it necessary to include any of the above details.

The article continues to jump back and forth in time. They describe the post-mortem examination of the injuries sustained by the child, then flick back to the death of the child, describing the 999 call and the circumstances in which the child was found. The Mail then includes a short statement from a neighbour describing Navsarka as ‘like a mouse’ and ‘really quiet’ – further emphasising her vulnerability. The Mail then offers a brief summary of Navsarka’s life. She was 18 when she became pregnant, living alone and on benefits. A young single mother, living on benefits in a council flat – perhaps not entirely relevant, but it does paint the picture of a person the Mail and its readers normally despise.

Furthermore, the child’s father is described as ‘absent’ in inverted commas, the inverted commas add more connotations to the word, allowing the reader to create the story of why he is absent or what his absence means. The reader, after already hearing that the mother is single, on benefits and living in a council house, can now project their own prejudices onto the absent father – creating a fictional scenario as to what an ‘absent’ father means.

With these added details the Mail again revels in ambiguity about the cause of the child’s death and who was responsible. The mother was single, young and living on benefits; this is generally viewed as a bad thing by the Mail and could she therefore be responsible? The ‘absent’ father is perhaps also in the frame, for not being present, for allowing this to happen. The Times does not include any of these details either.

The Mail is also more explicit with its apportioning of blame: ‘Everything changed when Anwar… moved in’. In a couple of paragraphs the Mail moves from the birth on Christmas Eve 2005 to ‘the fear in that little child when he threatened to lock her in the cupboard’ (3 years later). Anwar is very much the villain of the piece, as well he might be, but there is still room to question further the role of social services.

The Mail gives a lot of information about when Social services first became involved, and how they had met the child and parents just three weeks before her death yet ‘saw no bruises on the child’. They also mention that the couple took the child to Kirklees Council offices twice in the days before her death, again implying that the council were negligent for not noticing that anything was wrong with the child. The Mail concludes the article with a quotation from Detective Inspector Trevor Gasson.

The Times ends with the comments of Kirklees council, which gives the agency involved the final word, whilst the Mail gives the second to last paragraph to the same information.

‘Systematically beaten’

The Mail describes the child being beaten to death systematically:

yet the writer later describes the injuries with the details taken from the post-mortem and provides a model of the child that seems to indicate that the injuries were random and not in fact systematic. Nonetheless, the Mail states that ‘Social workers from Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire met the couple and the girl three times during the period she was being systematically beaten to death, but had no idea what Sanam was enduring’. The Mail implies that the social workers should have spotted that something was wrong, as they state that during this period the child was being systematically beaten.

Furthermore, they move beyond implication 4 paragraphs later when they state: ‘The murder raises further questions about the actions of Kirklees social workers – who were criticised over their care of kidnapped schoolgirl Shannon Matthews.’ The Mail is providing an organisation to blame, and they add to their case by linking this incident to a previous incident in which the social workers did come under intense scrutiny – particularly by the Mail. Thus the phrase 'systematically beaten' reinforces the Mail's attempt to blame Kirklees council, yet an analysis of the evidence article suggests that the injuries were not systematic at all, which raises doubt over when the injuries would have taken place, and whether they would be visual to a visiting social worker. 

‘The toddler’s fate was sealed’

Furthermore, the Mail contradict their implications that something could have been done by social workers just two paragraphs later: ‘The toddler’s fate was sealed from the moment Anwar spotted her pretty single mother…’. Fate is:

So, if indeed this was the moment that sealed the ‘toddler’s fate’ then nothing could have been done to prevent the toddler’s death, although, of course, this is precisely the opposite of what the writer is implying throughout the article.

‘Tragic girl’s month of ‘unbelievable’ agony’

Tragic:

Tragedy:

The misuse of the word tragedy by tabloid newspapers is widespread. Again, like the mention of fate, it takes away the chance of anything happening differently. A tragic death is traditionally caused by a character fault of the person that ends up dying: Hamlet is always fated to die because he cannot bring himself to take direct action; Macbeth is fated to die because he is too wildly ambitious. Their death is inherently caused by their own personalities, and outside influences are therefore not wholly relevant to their deaths; if circumstances had been different they may have died at a different time, but they still would have died eventually due to the same character fault they possess. So to say that the death of this girl is tragic is to imply her death was somehow caused by a character fault that she possessed - it actually takes responsibility away from the Mother and her partner because a tragic death is always inevitable.

The Mail seem to have difficulty understanding that when you mention ‘tragedy’ and ‘fate’ in relation to someone’s death you are actually stating that nothing could have stopped the death taking place. It therefore seems a little strange to start asking questions of social services about how such a death could have been prevented.

Conclusion

A brief analysis of the language and content of the average Mail article reveals how voyeuristic and judgemental the Mail is. It also demonstrates that the meaning of some of the clichés used by the writer of this particular article are not understood by the writer, and a close analysis of these phrases actually serves to highlight how such phrases undermine the message that the writer is trying to transmit. It is important to closely read the language of tabloid newspaers in order to reclaim meaning from becoming completely obsfucated by the purposeful emotive misuse of language.