The Daily Mail, often known simply as the Mail, is a British daily middle-market tabloid-size conservative newspaper founded in 1896 and published in London. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982, a Scottish edition was launched in 1947, and an Irish edition in 2006. Content from the paper appears on the MailOnline news website, although the website is managed separately and has its own editor.John Pilger Hidden Agendas , London: Vintage, 1998, p. 440Peter Wilby "Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain" , New Statesman, 19 December 2013 (online version: 2 January 2014)
The paper is owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, a great-grandson of one of the original co-founders, is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail and General Trust, while day-to-day editorial decisions for the newspaper are usually made by a team led by the editor. Ted Verity succeeded Geordie Greig as editor in November 2021.
A survey in 2014 found the average age of its readers was 58, and it had the lowest demographic for 15- to 44-year-olds among the major British dailies. Uniquely for a British daily newspaper, women make up the majority (52–55%) of its readership. It had an average daily circulation of 1.13 million copies in February 2020. Between April 2019 and March 2020 it had an average daily readership of approximately 2.18 million, of whom approximately 1.41 million were in the ABC1 demographic and 0.77 million in the C2DE demographic. Its website had more than 218 million unique visitors per month in 2020.
The Daily Mail has won several awards, including receiving the National Newspaper of the Year award from The Press Awards nine times since 1994 (). The Society of Editors selected it as the 'Daily Newspaper of the Year' for 2020. The Daily Mail has been criticised for its unreliability, its printing of sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories about science and medical research, and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement. In February 2017, the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a reliable source.
Overview The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format on 3 May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding. On this date it also absorbed the Daily Sketch, which had been published as a tabloid by the same company.
The publisher of the Mail, the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in February 2020 show gross daily sales of 1,134,184 for the Daily Mail. According to a December 2004 survey, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats. The main concern of Viscount Rothermere, the current chairman and main shareholder, is that the circulation be maintained. He testified before a House of Lords select committee that "we need to allow editors the freedom to edit", and therefore the newspaper's editor was free to decide editorial policy, including its political allegiance. In November 2021, Ted Verity began a new seven-day role as editor of Mail newspapers, with responsibility for the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and You magazine.
History Early history
The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies, but the print run on the first day was 397,215, and additional printing facilities had to be acquired to sustain a circulation that rose to 500,000 in 1899. Lord Salisbury, 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, dismissed the Daily Mail as "a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys." By 1902, at the end of the Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world.
With Harold running the business side of the operation and Alfred as editor, the Mail from the start adopted an imperialist political stance, taking a patriotic line in the Second Boer War, leading to claims that it was not reporting the issues of the day objectively.Gardiner, The Times, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1917 p. 113 The Mail also set out to entertain its readers with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions. It was the first newspaper to recognise the potential market of the female reader with a women's interest section and hired one of the first female war correspondents Sarah Wilson who reported during the Second Boer War.
In 1900, the Daily Mail began printing simultaneously in both Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to do so (in 1899, the Daily Mail had organised special trains to bring the London-printed papers north). The same production method was adopted in 1909 by the Daily Sketch, in 1927 by the Daily Express and eventually by virtually all the other national newspapers. Printing of the Scottish Daily Mail was switched from Edinburgh to the Deansgate plant in Manchester in 1968 and, for a while, The People was also printed on the Mail presses in Deansgate. In 1987, printing at Deansgate ended, and the northern editions were thereafter printed at other Associated Newspapers plants.
For a time in the early 20th century, the paper championed vigorously against the "Yellow Peril", warning of the alleged dangers said to be posted by Chinese immigration to the United Kingdom. The "Yellow Peril" theme came to be abandoned because the Anglo-German naval race led to a more plausible threat to the British empire to be presented. In common with other Conservative papers, the Daily Mail used the Anglo-German naval race as a way of criticising the Liberal governments that were in power from 1906 onward, claiming that the Liberals were too pusillanimous in their response to the Tirpitz plan.
In 1906, the paper offered £10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester, followed by a £1,000 prize for the first flight across the English Channel. Punch magazine thought the idea preposterous and offered £10,000 for the first flight to Mars, but by 1910 both the Mails prizes had been won. The paper continued to award prizes for aviation sporadically until 1930. Virginia Woolf criticised the Daily Mail as an unreliable newspaper, citing the statement published in the Daily Mail in July 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion that "every one of the Europeans was put to the sword in a most atrocious manner" as the Daily Mail maintained that the entire European community in Beijing had been massacred. A month later in August 1900 the Daily Mail published a story about the relief of the western Legations in Beijing, where the westerners in Beijing together with the thousands of Chinese Christians had been under siege by the Boxers.
Before the outbreak of the First World War, the paper was accused of warmongering when it reported that Germany was planning to crush the British Empire. When war began, Northcliffe's call for conscription was seen by some as controversial, although he was vindicated when conscription was introduced in 1916.The New York Times Current History 1917, New York Times Company, 1917 p. 211 In May 1915, Northcliffe criticised Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, regarding weapons and munitions. Kitchener was considered by some to be a national hero. The paper's circulation dropped from 1,386,000 to 238,000. Fifteen hundred members of the London Stock Exchange burned unsold copies and called for a boycott of the Harmsworth Press. Prime Minister H. H. Asquith accused the paper of being disloyal to the country.
When Kitchener died, the Mail reported it as a great stroke of luck for the British Empire. The paper was critical of Asquith's conduct of the war, and he resigned in December 1916. His successor David Lloyd George asked Northcliffe to be in his cabinet, hoping it would prevent him from criticising the government. Northcliffe declined.
According to Piers Brendon: Northcliffe's methods made the Mail the most successful newspaper hitherto seen in the history of journalism. But by confusing gewgaws with pearls, by selecting the paltry at the expense of the significant, by confirming atavistic prejudices, by oversimplifying the complex, by dramatising the humdrum, by presenting stories as entertainment and by blurring the difference between news and views, Northcliffe titillated, if he did not debouch, the public mind; he polluted, if he did not poison, the wells of knowledge.Piers Brendon, Eminent Edwardians: Four figures who defined their age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell (1979), pp 25–26
Inter-war period
1919–1930
Light-hearted stunts enlivened Northcliffe, such as the 'Hat campaign' in the winter of 1920. This was a contest with a prize of £100 for a new design of hat – a subject in which Northcliffe took a particular interest. There were 40,000 entries and the winner was a cross between a top hat and a bowler christened the Daily Mail Sandringham Hat. The paper subsequently promoted the wearing of it but without much success.
In 1919, Alcock and Brown made the first flight across the Atlantic, winning a prize of £10,000 from the Daily Mail. In 1930 the Mail made a great story of another aviation stunt, awarding another prize of £10,000 to Amy Johnson for making the first solo flight from England to Australia.
The Daily Mail had begun the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1908. At first, Northcliffe had disdained this as a publicity stunt to sell advertising and he refused to attend. But his wife exerted pressure upon him and he changed his view, becoming more supportive. By 1922 the editorial side of the paper was fully engaged in promoting the benefits of modern appliances and technology to free its female readers from the drudgery of housework. The Mail maintained the event until selling it to Media 10 in 2009. As Lord Northcliffe aged, his grip on the paper slackened and there were periods when he was not involved. His physical and mental health declined rapidly in 1921, and he died in August 1922 at age 57. His brother Lord Rothermere took full control of the paper.
In the Chanak Crisis of 1922, Britain almost went to war with Turkey. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George, supported by the War Secretary Winston Churchill, were determined to go to war over the Turkish demand that the British leave their occupation zone with Churchill sending out telegrams asking for Canada, Australia and New Zealand to all send troops for the expected war. George Ward Price, the "extra-special correspondent" of The Daily Mail was sympathetic towards the beleaguered British garrison at Chanak, but was also sympathetic towards the Turks. Ward Price wrote in his articles that Mustafa Kemal did not have wider ambitions to restore the lost frontiers of the Ottoman Empire and only wanted the Allies to leave Asia Minor. The Daily Mail ran a huge banner headline on 21 September 1922 that stated "Get Out Of Chanak!" In a leader (editorial), the Daily Mail wrote that the views of Churchill, who very much favoured going to war with Turkey, were "bordering on insanity". The same leader noted that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada had rejected Churchill's request for troops, which led the leader to warn that Churchill's efforts to call upon the Dominions for help for the expected war were endangering the unity of the British empire.