damage control
The Guardian provides coverage of continuing damage control over at the Daily Mail:
The Irish Daily Mail has attempted to distance itself from the Jan Moir's controversial column about the death of Stephen Gately, claiming it is "independent" of the UK edition of the paper. [...]The (apparent/confusing) claim that the Irish Daily Mail doesn't have an online presence is false, unless it's an even more confusing claim that Moir's column doesn't have an online presence in Ireland. Is this a claim that Moir is - and has always been - regionally blocked? If so, is it too late to become Irish?
The Irish Mail on Sunday carried four pages of coverage on Gately's funeral in Dublin and printed a disclaimer, as did the Irish Daily Mail yesterday: "Comments made by journalist Jan Moir about Stephen Gately in her newspaper column caused controversy on Friday. Jan Moir's column has never been published in the Irish Daily Mail which, like the Irish Mail on Sunday, is edited and printed entirely in Ireland – independent of the UK titles – and does not have an online presence."
The paper carries copy from the UK edition, although much of it is rewritten for an Irish readership.
It's a curious claim because the Irish and UK versions of the Mail website reveal a huge amount of overlap in the "independently edited" titles; at time of writing, for example, the hand-chosen (ahem) "Editor's Six of The Best" features are identical for both Irish and UK versions of the website, with no detectable differences in linked content. Sadly, Richard Littlejohn is available everywhere.
Furthermore, note that the shaky claim on editorial independence doesn't appear to extend as far as a direct rejection of Moir's comments; at best, it's merely a grudging recognition of the issue, forced by Gately's popularity in his home country.
In fact, the (sometimes widely) divergent editorial lines embraced by the Irish and UK editions exist on the basis of happy mutual ignorance, neither truly recognising the existence of the other: never has this been more obvious than in the case of the diametrically opposed editorial stances on the HPV vaccine.
In other words, claiming "independence" is another way of never having to say you're sorry.
1 comments:
There was also another reason that they distanced themselves. A prominent Hurling star, Donal Og Cusack had his autobiography serialised in the Irish DM, and on the weekend of Gately's funeral it was published that he was gay.
The serialisations would have brought about a significant sales boost, as he is a prominent outspoken member of the Gaelic Player's Association, a union trying to negotiate better terms for intercounty GAA players, in what is an amateur sport.
I doubt if that bombshell was not in the pipeline, the Irish DM would not have published the article.
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