According to The Daily Mail, some things that increase the risk of cancer are: aspirin, babies, bacon, being a black person, being a woman, being a man, being Southern, blow jobs, bras, a broken heart, children, cod liver oil, crayons, dogs, Facebook, flip-flops, being tall, large heads, left handedness, pregnancy, sex, teen sex and working. 

If you are a southerner who wears bras, has a broken heart and wears flip-flops, you might, understandably, be concerned. Visit the Facebook group ‘The Daily Mail list of ‘Things that give you cancer’’ to see a list of the many other things that The Daily Mail has linked to cancer and to read the original articles.  But really, there has been no paper over the last decade that has demonstrated consistently and unashamedly that scaring its readers into buying it is more important than credible journalism. 

I’m not going to deny that I occasionally read The Daily Mail when I’m looking for some entertainment. Even this week I read ‘The tell tail clue to a happy dog…they wag it to the left’ and ‘Lord of the dance: Prince Harry ditches ceremony and gets down to the Calypso beat in Haiti fundraising effort’. I even perused ‘Not so steady cam!  The first film to be shot entirely by chimps using bash proof cameras’ with interest. 

Even if these stories are completely inaccurate – even if a happy dog wags its tail to the right and Harry never ‘got down’ to any beat, Calypso or otherwise – it is unlikely to change my life in any way, and more importantly it won’t have widespread consequences for the public in general.

But sometimes it is serious. While the media in general were careless during the MMR scare, The Daily Mail was particularly irresponsible. In fact, I think the paper has yet to produce a well written, informative and balanced science article. 

The Daily Mail is to science what Jedward were to The X Factor: entertaining and popular with the public, but not for the right reasons.