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Making headlines

Introduction

Making headlines

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The Daily Mail

Ronnie Biggs
(PA)

The Daily Mail’s airlift of Vietnamese orphans was a classic example of newspapers' drive to be first with the news. What better way than to create the story yourself?

David English was a prime mover in entrepreneurial journalism. First at the Daily Sketch and then at the Daily Mail, the chequebook ruled in the fight for readership. Within in a short time of joining the Mail, he had moved it from a broadsheet to a tabloid beloved of middle England. Tactics employed like never before were the scoop and big moral campaign.

In one famous exposé, journalist Anthea Disney had her skin colour changed to deliver an inside experience of living in the Asian community in Birmingham. As with the orphans, the long-term implications were overlooked, and for Disney it was a year before her skin returned to normal.

Although journalists work to the Press Code of Conduct veto on inaccurate, misleading or distorted material and making bargains with criminals, as they step a line between newspapers' political allegiances, sometimes sparse information, and the widely interpreted 'public interest', the truth is often hard to pin down. Neither is this perceived power to influence a new phenomenon.

• Back in the middle of the 17th century the Oxford-based Mercurius Aulicus reported that one of Cromwell's Roundheads had been found committing a sex act on a mare. This had the duel effect of undermining the enemies of Royalist paper and appealing to the perceived desire of the public to buy any paper containing a lewd story.

• In a story recounting how a young woman had been the victim of 'drugging and violation'the News of the World in 1843 laid the blame at the door of a local chemist. Yet the woman had clearly stated that she did not know who had done it. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

• A week before the 1924 General Election a letter arrived at the Daily Mail offices reputed to be from the Communist International president Grigori Zinoviev to the British Communist Party, 'masters of Ramsay MacDonald’s government'. It contained details of a plot to create a UK civil war. Even though there were strong suspicions that it was a forgery, proved in the mid-1960s, the Daily Mail went ahead and published it, as did other newspapers. MacDonald lost the election.

• Reportedly, The Sun paid £60,000 for a private jet to fly Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs from Rio de Janeiro and to Britain this year 'to face justice'. On one day, the paper had seven pages devoted to Biggs, pictured in a T-shirt splashed with the tabloid's masthead.

• Money was paid to child-killer Mary Bell to collaborate in a book.

• A book by Jonathan Aitken, jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice, was serialised in a newspaper.

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