The Daily Mail ought to be banned. It channels harmful, retrogressive opinions, based on information of dubious authenticity and accuracy, to a daily readership of about 1.7 million people. 

Every year Cambridge students celebrate Caesarian Sunday on Jesus Green, the last big event before exams begin, and every year The Daily Mail publishes an article about it. 2012’s event, infamous because of the pig’s head on a spike and port-filled condoms, caught the attention of the wider media. But this year’s Caesarian Sunday, like last year and the year before that, passed without incident. In fact, this year’s Caesarian Sunday was probably the least turbulent in recent history, and it rained.

Still, The Daily Mail made its best efforts to appal its readership with the heinous activities that students at “prestigious Cambridge University” get up to. By and large, such public defamation does little to insult the sensibilities of students. Many seem to relish the opportunity to be photographed by The Daily Mail; we enjoy spotting photographs of our friends and reading the laconic, obvious and derogatory captions.

But this year’s article has tipped me over the edge, not only because the event was void of newsworthy information, but because The Daily Mail’s hackneyed attempts to demonise students are only one of many areas in which the tabloid goes beyond the call of reasonable journalism to publish material that is intrusive, misleading and saturated with harmful preconceptions. 

My complaint is, of course, not limited to The Daily Mail’s defamation of students; Caesarian Sunday simply provides a useful case study for the tabloid’s manipulation of information, since many of us attended the event, or at least know people who did. More damaging than its attack on students, The Daily Mail regularly promulgates misogyny and xenophobia, barely concealed under the guise of objective reporting.

My experience of the more sinister side of The Daily Mail’s reporting is through my grandparents. Every few months my grandma sends me articles from the science section about miscellaneous rubbish or non-existent migraine remedies. “The Muslims” have become so firmly associated with terrorists in my granddad’s subconscious, a subconscious deeply agitated by the threat of religious extremism, that, when I attended a pub quiz with him several summers ago, he suggested our team name should be “the Muslim haters”. My grandparents are, by and large, reasonable, loving people. They come from a very different generation and background to me, but their opinions are heavily affected by what they read in The Daily Mail. 

I have tried to persuade them to alter their newspaper of choice, but they like The Daily Mail because it is easy to read, and they read a lot because that is what a lot of old people do. Unfortunately, therefore, their world view is heavily skewed by journalism which is, at best, sensationalist and hyperbolic, and, at worst, unmitigated, fallacious bullshit. It leaves my granddad persistently troubled by the dual threat of terrorists and immigrants, and my grandma worried that I might have been involved in the “drinking out of bins and stripping off” in which, apparently, “thousands of students at prestigious Cambridge University” participated on Sunday.

So, briefly, here are a few things that are wrong about The Daily Mail’s report. To begin, the article guesses that “more than 2,000 undergraduates” took part in the event. This seems a significant overestimation; it hardly justifies the suggestion, in the headline, that “thousands” of students attended. The article describes “some pouring alcohol into each other's mouths and others drinking it from bins”. I didn’t witness either activity. I would be surprised if more than one person drank out of a bin, but through imprecision and the use of the word “some” rather than “one”, The Daily Mail tacitly implies that this was going on all over the place. The same goes for the “stripping off” described in the headline. I didn’t even see anyone with their shirt off, and The Daily Mail didn’t have photos to back up their claim. It hardly seems newsworthy that, on a warm day, people took off their jumpers.

The Daily Mail give something away of their underlying bias in the following sentence, particularly in the use of the word “just”. “The undergraduates”, the article states, “sat around playing drinking games and larking about in the park as families and dog walkers just yards away looked on”. This is, The Daily Mail would have you believe, outrageous, insensitive behaviour. I must admit, I have limited sympathy for the families, and especially the dog walkers, who were forced to witness – “just” yards away from them – students “sat around … larking about”. 

Students? Sitting around? Larking about? There goes £9,000 of fees and a good wodge of tax payers’ money. I’m glad the dog walkers, at least, were on the move, and were not intending to sit down just yards away from these dangerous student reprobates. The online commenters make explicit what in the article is implied: “it explains why this country has gone so wrong”, wrote one commenter. While another exclaimed, “getting drunk like that is gross but seemingly acceptable here”. “Just getting in a bit of practice for their forthcoming political careers”, suggested a third.

It is difficult to attack The Daily Mail because much of its perniciousness is hidden in implication, concealed in what is not said. The Daily Mail is, as Professor Simon Keynes says of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “laconic, impersonal [and] seemingly objective’, sometimes “with little sense of direction or deeper purpose”, and it benefits from “the kind of credibility which arises from a profusion of circumstantial detail”. 

But despite this, The Daily Mail, like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is deeply pervaded by a bias. This manifests itself in sporadic hints in the main text, but it exerts itself most powerfully in the selection of its articles, in its skewed (or false) statistics and in the details included and the details omitted. For example, the fact that Cambridge University has almost 12,000 undergraduates, of which less than a sixth attended the event, went without mention (and the rest were probably in the library, on a Sunday). 

This case study could easily have been replaced by multiple others. Just a quick look at the right-hand rail of The Mail Online provides abundant evidence to support claims of misogyny; this week’s column includes articles about Kim Kardashian’s “ample cleavage”, Kelly Brook “NAKED [sic.]” and Kris Kardashian “without make-up”. Then there is Monday’s article, the headline of which begins, “mother appears in court with lashes poking out of burkha”. The story might be deemed newsworthy, but it is entirely inappropriate to comment on the mother-in-question’s “astonishingly-long eyelashes”, accompanied by a tacit stab at burkhas.

Banning The Daily Mail is not akin to placing limits on people’s freedom of speech. Absolute freedom of speech is an individual right, but the same carte blanche is not, and should not be applicable to national organisations: there is a significant difference between allowing individuals a platform to express themselves and entitling a powerful media organisation to disseminate a wealth of toxic opinions and erroneous facts to well over a million people every day. To abolish The Daily Mail would not impinge on individual freedom of speech; it would simply cut off a significant channel through which multiple specious, harmful articles reach a mass audience on a regular basis. 

One day, people will look at The Daily Mail as an amusing relic of a socially narrow-minded time, to be displayed in museums and laughed at or tutted at by passers-by. But it has no place as a profit-making, influential media outlet in the present day.

@bret_cameron