Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Quote

Instead, the Daily Mail’s editor picked out only the ‘brightest’ items of news, digested them, and rewrote them so as to turn them into ‘stories’. These always had to be short, strongly prejudiced in some direction, and either sentimental or sensational. The headlines were calculated to provoke, rather than merely to suggest what the paragraph was about; scandals and crime figured largely in its pages, and for preference there must always be some figure of hatred set up like a guy to be knocked down. It was a whole new concept of journalism, and it had met with severe disapproval from the penny broadsheets and those who read them. The idea was not to inform but to entertain, to tickle the palate and play on the prejudices of the domestic servant and the junior clerk, of that whole mass of the