In a world brimming with information, opinion, and the occasional fact, there stands a monument to national bewilderment: the Daily Mail. To be fair, one could substitute the Mail for the Express, Sun, Telegraph, and others too. Reading it, one might argue, is less a pursuit of knowledge and more a self-inflicted cranial paper cut, the kind that gets infected with poorly sourced outrage and a sidebar of celebrities in bikinis.
To describe the experience of flicking through the Mail’s pages (digital or otherwise) is to conjure images of licking out the cat litter tray — warm, gritty, and inexplicably popular with people who claim to have “done their own research.”
Middle England’s Morning Dose of Mild Panic
The Mail’s true genius lies in its ability to turn absolutely anything into a national crisis. An avocado shortage becomes a leftist conspiracy. A minor royal’s outfit choice spirals into a full-blown cultural reckoning. A woman breastfeeding in a park? The very fabric of society is under threat!
All accompanied, of course, by bold headlines that scream like a boozy aunt at a wedding and articles that seem to have been fact-checked by a Magic 8-Ball.
“COULD YOUR TOAST BE MAKING YOU GAY?”
“IS MEGHAN MARKLE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION?”
“EXCLUSIVE: M&S TO SELL VEGAN SAUSAGES — ARE THEY COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN?”
No, they’re not. And also, calm down.
A Side of Misogyny with Your Full English
The Daily Mail has long offered the nation a balanced diet: one helping of moral panic, two scoops of pseudo-science, and a healthy drizzle of sexism. Their infamous Sidebar of Shame reads like the fever dream of a teenage boy trapped in the 1950s.
“See how thin she’s got!”
“Look how old she looks!”
“Look at her legs!”
“She was spotted shopping for cucumbers — interpret that how you will.”
It’s like being heckled by a gossiping ghost who died of self-righteousness.
The Readers: Commenters from the Depths
And then there are the comments. Ah, the comments. A dark ocean where nuance goes to drown. Beneath every article lies a trench of fury, racism, and misplaced nostalgia, populated by usernames like Brit4Eva1991 and CommonSenseBloke who unironically believe the country went downhill when the BBC stopped playing the national anthem at midnight.
The following was posted when migrants drowned in the Channel.
They rail against “snowflakes” while crying about a Greggs vegan sausage roll. They long for “the good old days,” though suspiciously, none of them can agree when those actually were.
So Why Do People Still Read It?
The Mail scratches an itch: the one just behind the eyeball, where suspicion festers and empathy goes to rot. It doesn’t inform so much as affirm, a comforting echo chamber of fears you didn’t know you had and solutions no one asked for.
It’s not journalism. It’s emotional junk food: greasy, addictive, and likely to leave you confused, bloated, and inexplicably angry at single mothers.
And yet, every day, millions return. Clicking, tutting, and nodding along like bobbleheads on a dashboard speeding towards irrelevance.
Because after all… licking out the cat litter may be foul, but for some, it’s a taste they’ve grown to crave.
