Dear Daily Mail (et al)

Letter from Munguin

You see, this is how it works.

You write things. People read them. Some of them understand, or misunderstand, them.

Most intelligent people don’t actually believe anything you write. We know it’s all about headlines that grab attention and make you money. As Stuart Campbell, a proper journalist, has said on many occasions, people rarely get beyond the first few paragraphs of any story. So, it is easy to keep yourself legal by rubbishing your headline in paragraph 12, continued on page 17.

Indeed, these days, most people only see the headline as they pass them in the supermarket, so there is absolutely no danger of them seeing the truth on page 17.

But there are people who believe the crap in your headlines. The crap you have written.

These headlines have been telling people for years that all that ails the UK can be summed up in one word. “Foreigners”. ‘Coming over here taking our jobs, taking our women or men, taking our houses, our school places, our social security, our hospital beds, being criminals and rapists, etc.

You’ve preached a message of HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE…

And now, after a particularly vicious campaign against anyone or thing foreign, in order to achieve the catastrophe that is Brexit, you feign horror that British people, quite possibly influenced by your vile lying headlines, have attacked a 17-year-old asylum seeker, leaving him for dead, while other British people stood by and watched and did nothing. And why would they? They’ve been reading your headlines for years. They probably believe that this lad is the source of all their woes. Probably a criminal, a rapist and that he’s depriving decent English people of their health service.

And you, Daily Mail, have the audacity to make of it a front page headline with the judgement “SAVAGES”, so you can sell more papers.

Of course, we realise that you have never actually in so many words encouraged people to beat up foreigners. Goodness, no. You’re a bit more subtle than that.

But what you have taught some of the hard of thinking is to HATE foreigners. To BLAME foreigners. And while you have been blaming them, and not the policies of the great Brtish Government for all that ails this country (undoubtedly the real problem), you have encouraged attitudes which have filtered down to the thugs and resulted in this atrocity, and many others.

Once you infect some people’s heads with an impression, however idiotic and ridiculous, it is almost impossible to get rid of it. Ask the family of the Polish man who was killed for being Polish and still being here after Brexit. As the family of Jo Cox, who was killed because she supported the EU. To attempt to infect people’s minds with lies on a daily basis is irresponsible and frankly criminal.

So well done, Daily Mail and your friends at the Daily Express, the Star and the Sun.

To be honest, though, I imagine that most of your readers are more interested in who Charlie’s been bonking (it’s his good looks that do it, obviously). Remember the old adage, ‘when the mistress becomes the wife she leaves a vacancy’. And there’s nothing like a royal story to fill an empty mind.

You’re a shameful blot on a noble profession.

Regards

Munguin