Today’s suggestion is #336, which suggests:

Force them to sit down and watch the movie, Patton.

Then ask them just how well we’d have done in World War II with an army led by men like Barack (“We could learn from the Nazis’ outreach to Islam”) Obama, draft-dodging Bill Clinton, Al (“All these explosions must be bad for the environment”) Gore, Jimmy (“America has to get over her inordinate fear of National Socialism”) Carter…

The first problem one might notice with his suggestion is that the movie Pattonis, you know, a movie. Also, Delingpole may be unaware of the fact that the United States was led in World War II—not by General Patton, or George W. Bush—but by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So I’m not sure that Delingpole’s theoretical leftie will be driven crazy, except for being forced to deal with the ravings of a cretin. A person quick on his feet might also point up the shortcomings of Ronald (arms-for-hostages) Reagan and Dick (five deferments) Cheney.

Shame on him, but that isn’t where it ends. George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush ought to be embarrassed that they invited Limbaugh to the White House.  The Claremont Institute, whose work I often respect, ought to be mortified that they sullied their Statesmanship Award by bestowing it upon Limbaugh. Shame on National Review for celebrating one of conservatism’s most controversial figures in a symposium that didn’t even acknowledge his many critics on the right. In it Heather Higgins remarked on “Rush’s long track record of accurate predictions and analyses,” Kathryn Jean Lopez commented on his “graciousness and humility,” Mary Matalin said “he epitomizes what we all aspire to be, both as citizens and individuals,” Andrew McCarthy claims his message is “always” delivered with “optimism, civility, and good humor,” and Jay Nordlinger asserted that “he is almost the antithesis of the modern American, in that he doesn’t whine.” Every last claim is too absurd to satire, let alone defend.

He is right that Limbaugh is shameless and contemptible, but that’s obviously not a problem for the Claremont Institute, National Review and the right-wing in general. Limbaugh looks at the world and sees Us and Them, and consequently he is a very wealthy man.

By the way, I assume that Limbaugh’s latest eruption is the sort of PR nightmare that the NFL was concerned with when they refused to allow him to become an owner a couple of years ago.

There are a disturbing number of journalists out there who cannot count to two. I captured a screen shot of a story — originally from the Daily Caller, but syndicated on Yahoo — with the following title: Poll: Romney leads New Hampshire, Huntsman in third, Perry in fourth. Though the headline has since changed to acknowledge Paul’s existence, it indicates that some elements of American media are still all-too-comfortable omitting the candidate from public consideration.

The headlines above refer to a poll that was conducted by Suffolk University/7NEWS.

Ron Paul is polling second place in New Hampshire, at a painfully distant 14 percent compared to frontrunner Romney, who is in a very comfortable lead with 41 percent. But if it is important to note Huntsman’s 10 percent, or Perry’s 8, it is certainly worth mentioning that the Tea Party’s progenitor is polling in the double digits.

A similar chain of events unfolded following Ron Paul’s second place win at the Ames straw poll, where he lost to Michelle Bachmann by less than 200 votes. Afterward, the candidate saw little media exposure, regardless of his statistical tie. The Daily Show‘s John Stewart took the mainstream media to task afterward asking, “how did libertarian Ron Paul become the 13th floor of a hotel?”

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

The most absurd response comes from Glenn Reynolds, who writes, “Don’t be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man. Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately, his messiah has feet of clay — hell, forget the “feet” part, the clay goes at least waist-high — and it seems likely he’ll have even less reason to like the coming decade than the last, and he’ll certainly have even less influence than he’s had. Thus, he tries to piss all over the people he’s always hated and envied (emphasis added).”

I have long suspected that Reynolds only reads the parts he wants to and this post is further evidence. If we are to presume that he believes that President Obama is Krugman’s “messiah” (he only implies such) then clearly, Reynolds never actually reads the Nobel Prize winning Times columnist. Krugman has never been much of a fan of Obama. In January of 2008, Krugman wrote about Obama’s response to the recession:

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

That last sentence is an obvious reference to George W. Bush, which should be enough to dispel the notion that Krugman is some sort of Obama worshiper who has become recently disillusioned.

I won’t resort to the sort of childish taunts (today, at least) that Reynolds uses. I don’t think that he is bitter or jealous of Krugman (though the latter’s status is vastly greater), but I do believe that he cares most about which team has the ball than anything else. While Krugman has been harshly critical of both the Bush and Obama presidencies, Reynolds only became a strong critic of the executive branch on about January, 20 of 2009—back in 2008 when Krugman was fretting about recession, Reynolds was shilling for the Bush White House.

UPDATE: Ron Paul (via Balloon Juice) adds, “We should never forget those in our government who used the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history as an excuse to launch completely unrelated wars, to do unprecedented damage to Americans’ historic liberties, to run roughshod over the Constitution, and to betray the Founders’ vision by savaging some of our most deeply held values.”

You can see what I wrote two days after the attacks here.

One school of thought says ghostwritten op-eds are a lot like speechwriter-written speeches. Since we all know that most famous people don’t write all their own lines for speeches, goes this defence of the practice, we should assume the same with a byline – whether on a book or an op-ed. It’s a tempting analogy, but wrong in a key way: a false byline is an outright, direct lie. And news organisations that run these pieces are encouraging dishonesty, which they compound, albeit with good motives, by helpfully editing often turgid prose to make it more compelling.

Gillmor’s dismay over the proliferation of op-eds with candidate bylines is understandable; places like the Wall Street Journal carry them nearly every other day, causing readers looking for something other than reconstituted “turgid prose” and platitudes to ignore them.

The analogy between teleprompter-assisted speeches and published prose may indeed be problematic, but perhaps less so when considering what the modern campaign apparatus has become. It’s revealing when candidates slip into referring to themselves in the plural — some might be irritated at the use of the “royal we” — but it’s always struck me as honest, an admission that they are just the frontman of a giant apparatus that includes professionals and grassroots activists.  There may be a way forward here: let politicians keep their byline on ghosted items, but only if they use the majestic plural pronoun, a practice that would no doubt be so annoying as to lead to the disappearance of these press-releases-turned-op-eds altogether.

Imagine a presumably ghosted Sarah Palin op-ed that Gillmor seems particularly exercised about, rewritten in a plural voice:

We’ve always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, we took a stand against politicized science when we sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species … . We got clobbered for our actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but we stood by our view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of “climate change impacts” was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act.

Gillmor also leaves unclear where to draw the line between ghosting and heavy editing, which often involves significant rewriting. Even in an age of blogging, the best writers still benefit from a good editor — and surely this is true for most of The Honorable ones, too.

From time to time, I too must cross Harvard Yard, where last night a fleeting figure too bright to be his lady thrust into my hands this odious marvel:

Has Rupert world enough, and time,
To suffer young Bill’s latest rhyme?
Though he has authored, reprobate,
Conservatism’s parlous state.
While some teahouses on The Hill
Still deign to serve The Standard’s swill.
Others down by Watergate
Await Murdoch’s dictated slate.
Any other they’ll refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

But at his back, inspiring fear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurries near
As Newsweek in the dust doth lie
We hear The Weekly Standard cry
Subscribers no more can be found,
The economy’s run hard aground,
The markets plunge, jobs disappear,
As Kristol leads us from the rear.
Iran lacks nukes, yet still his Standard scores
Our nation’s policy by its count of wars.
Fought in middle eastern dust,
While Yankee credit turns to rust.
The Fed’s a fine and private place,
But none I think our bonds embrace.

So quick, before the curtain falls,
Upon his weekly’s hollow halls
Good neos rally, Happy band!
Lend your muse a helping hand,
Hasten him forward while you may
And bonds still rate a single A,

Manfully to embrace his fate,
And reverting to the just estate.
Of talking head with broken pate
Become a True Whig candidate.
Here ends the Marvellous allegory
Never was Kristol really a Tory.

As someone also getting up in years, I was moved by the sight of this haggard octogenarian on the TV screen. Moreover, the fact that Murdoch seems to have a revolving, indeterminate identity merits astonishment rather than contempt. Is he Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or all three? Is he an Australian or the advocate of an American global democratic empire? The grandson of an itinerant Presbyterian minister, whose mother may or may not have been Jewish, and whose present wife, with whom he attends Mass, is Asian and Catholic, Murdoch has struggled to be at least as diverse as the readership his press empire has targeted. But there’s one identity he’s been slipping into with growing ease, and we can pick it up by noticing the recipients of his billions of dollars. Murdoch makes no secret of the fact that he dispenses funds on the basis of convictions. While this website would never see a dime of his fortune, the neoconservative power structure is bathed in his wealth.

As an example of what Murdoch believes, let us reflect on his comments at a banquet held by the American Jewish Committee on March 4, 2009 honoring him as “man of the year.” Here Murdoch stresses his major concerns as a political actor and media baron. “In the new century,” he assures us,

the West is no longer a matter of geography. The West is defined by societies committed to freedom and democracy. … And if we are serious about meeting this challenge (of undemocratic terrorism), we would expand the only military alliance committed to the defense of the West to include those on the front lines of this war. That means bringing countries like Israel into NATO.

Has anyone missed the family resemblance between Murdoch’s politics and what one reads in the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and the New York Post and what comes our way from Murdoch’s subsidized clones on Fox News?

Murdoch also, not incidentally, laments the raging anti-Semitism that he discerns in Europe and which he thinks has become murderous. In his remarks he’s addressing the sponsors of Commentary, that is, a group that previewed and still finances neoconservative ideology. But his effusions of Jewish anxieties go beyond anything that one might expect to hear even in neocon circles. They are fully worthy of Allan Dershowitz and Steven Spielberg: “In Europe men and women who bear the tattoos of concentration camps today look on a continent where Jewish lives and Jewish property are under attack—and public debate poisoned by an anti-Semitism we thought had been dispatched to history’s dustbin.”

A few queries may be in order. How many former residents of concentration camps are around in Europe today? Whom will Murdoch invoke in order to appeal to Christian guilt when even this small number is gone? If anti-Semitism is “poisoning” Europe today, then why doesn’t Murdoch mention the obvious fact that some Muslim immigrants are producing it? He certainly grows after Hamas later in his comments, when he urges the creation of an American-Israeli front against anti-democratic terrorists. Why therefore does Murdoch leave the impression that it is rightwing European nationalists who are generating poisonous anti-Semitism? The grim truth is that multiculturalism has led not only to an indiscriminate Islamic immigration into Europe but also to attacks on Jews and synagogues. And to make matters even worse, European Jews, who are filled with anti-fascist fury, vote for politicians who are making this situation even worse. The vast majority of Jews in Western and Central Europe vote for the multicultural Left, and the German Central Committee for Jews in Germany (note not German Jews) screams bloody murder every time a politician tries to limit Muslim immigration into what used to be the German nation state.

While reading his speech, I was thinking how nice it would be if Murdoch withdrew his funding from the neocon empire. This may be the only point about which President Obama and I would agree. What Murdoch’s fortunes have done is allow a hegemonic persuasion, neoconservatism, give or take a few changeable additives, to gain undue influence on a drifting American Right, including the Republican Party. In the 1980s the conservative movement, whatever its deficiencies, exhibited a wide range of views on social and historical questions. Many of the views that are now identified with an alternative or disaligned Right were then expressed in National Review and in other widely read and once-interesting publications that have since come under neoconservative control. The major funder of neoconservative publications in the 1980s was the World Unification Church, and the recipients of funding from the Reverend Moon tried to hide their dependence on this leader of a Korean sect, by ridiculing their beneficiary. Then Rupert entered the scene and showered the neoconservatives with billions of dollars. This allowed them to get off the Moonie dole and into a powerful media position.

I’m not suggesting we’d all be on a level playing field if only Murdoch stopped funding the usual suspects. They would still be getting funds from multiple sources, including Asian governments fighting protectionism, global democratic troublemakers, and Jewish Democrats who support the neoconservatives on Israel. What would change would be the disparity between what neocons get and what the marginalized Right is surviving on. Moreover, it would no longer be necessary for libertarians or conservative Christians to depend on neocon generosity to get TV time or be treated sympathetically in the neoconservative-dominated press. More competition would be possible if the trust that Murdoch has subsidized fell apart.

Consider the New York Post’s coverage of gay marriage and immigration. Those who oppose these things are typically depicted in this paper as extremists or religious nuts, and  it is impossible to distinguish any longer between the social rhetoric of Murdoch’s Post and what one sees in the regular leftist press. The Post’s coverage of the murderous rampage by the Norwegian psychopath Anders Behring Breivik could have appeared in the New York Times, and it would be hard to believe from reading the Post’s account any more than the Times’s that those who call for the preservation of European nations and the limiting of Muslim immigration into Europe were doing anything but engaging in “Nazi rants.” To be fair, the Post, which vigorously supports Governor Cuomo on gay marriage, does differentiate itself from the Times by its ostentatious support of the Israeli Right and by calling on Obama to compromise with the Republicans on tax issues.

It would be possible to respond to my gripe by arguing that we should be grateful to Murdoch and the neocons for providing an opposition press. Were it not for the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Weekly Standard, there would be no adversarial press, and we’d be getting the propaganda of Obama-maniacs nonstop. One should therefore be grateful for small favors and not ask for more. The trouble is that the small favors have come at a prohibitive cost. Neoconservative censorship has destroyed the careers of brilliant young conservative journalists, and even older ones, who have not toed the party-line. The young conservative journalists and media personalities whom I encounter are with few exception low-octane liberals, and they are unduly belligerent toward “undemocratic” countries. They are the natural products of the last thirty years of neoconservative dominance of the American Right. If Murdoch pulled his money out, it might be possible for less programmed conservatives to succeed in gaining attention as spokesmen for their side.

Equally troubling, the result of Murdoch’s favoritism has created the impression that there is one “conservative” view about everything and that one can learn it each day by watching Fox and by reading some neocon satellite magazine. All self-identified conservatives of my acquaintance obtain their picture of reality by accessing these sources. Unless they are young and non-adjusted or crotchety reactionary types, they don’t bother with non-authorized news or opinion sources, from those who are not part of the establishment. Forty years ago there was no (artificially) unified conservative movement but competing factions, none of which spoke for more than its own group. Those who took over the movement came from left field, and they expelled those who did not fit their agenda while creating agreement on what they considered to be essential issues. One significant reason they were able to marginalize their opposition on the right was Rupert Murdoch’s boundless munificence. This Daddy Warbucks gave Kristol and Company the kind of financial power and media access needed to become an international force. Let’s see if this situation would go away absent Murdoch’s gifts.

Hari was the brightest young thing in respectable British lefty journalism. Indeed, he has been the recipient of the Orwell Prize, the UK’s top award for political writing. But now it looks like he’s going to have it revoked. The Orwell committee has put off announcing a decision while the Independent conducts an internal review, but blogger Guido Fawkes believes the verdict has already been reached. Why wait? Presumably to spare the Independent the indignity of being scooped on its own scandal.

The spring issue of The New Atlantis carries an excellent reflection on McLuhan by Alan Jacobs, who gets beyond the slogans — “the medium is the message” — that made McLuhan the Clay Shirky of his time. He is both overhyped and underappreciated, contends Jacobs, for McLuhan “never made arguments, only assertions … those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong, they are highly debatable.” At the same time, “McLuhan’s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed.” It was an example that inspired the trenchant critic of television Neil Postman, who in Jacobs’ estimation does the job better than McLuhan — leading Jacobs to suggest that “once one has absorbed [McLuhan's] example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.”

Jacobs points out that McLuhan’s writing style — frustrating to those trying to wring out an argument — may have been ahead of its time, resembling the assertion-based, quote-heavy, quick riffs that characterize much internet-based writing. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan shows familiarity with a wide literature, including many books that Jacobs contends later “transformed their disciplines.” Nevertheless,

To today’s reader, McLuhan’s responses to these works resemble nothing so much as a series of blog posts. … He quotes a passage, riffs on it for a few sentences or paragraphs, then moves on to another book: quote, riff, quote, riff. And sometimes just quote: one section consists largely of a lengthy three-paragraph selection from Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), while another gives seven brief paragraphs from Erik Barnouw’s Mass Communication (1956), in both cases with very brief introduction but no comment. As I have noted, the “mosaic” method here is an intentional homage to or imitation of the non-linear structures of the great Modernists. It may even be significant that what Yeats wanted to do, had he been granted the privilege of traveling through time to Justinian’s Byzantium, was to work in mosaic tile, to be absorbed thereby into a great collective endeavor in devotion to which he could forget his own identity. McLuhan’s refusal to produce a consecutive argument might well be an indication of his own mental quirks and limitations, but surely it was an attempt to allow “the Gutenberg Galaxy” — the vast constellation of idea, inventions, and practices that constitute “the making of typographic man” — to speak for itself.

Jacobs includes a discussion of McLuhan’s staunch Catholicism, an attribute that puzzled many in his circles. A convert and daily communicant, McLuhan never publicized his religion or waded into theological discussions.  McLuhan’s orthodoxy, argues Jacobs, was motivated in part by “a fundamental distrust of language.”

McLuhan’s comment that “Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today” should, I think, be taken seriously. McLuhan may, as [Douglas] Coupland says, have “pined for” a time when “books were read aloud in church by priests,” but he knew perfectly well that that era held its own spiritual dangers. This is why his short chapter on orality in Understanding Media is called “The Spoken Word: Flower of Evil?” Every form of communication, for McLuhan, presents a temptation to idolatry. Its failure to live up to its own promises must, therefore, be demonstrated through an invocation of its technological alternatives. It cannot be demonstrated through comparison to the secure knowledge found in mystical contemplation and in the Eucharist itself, for these are beyond words.

McLuhan, for all his sloppy blog-style pop-theory, acknowledged a transcendent realm in which his tools were unfit for true understanding, areas of human experience “beyond words.” If only today’s bloggers heeded his example.

[T]he Iraq War is Bill Kristol’s War as much as it is George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s, and the Standard is the vehicle that made it possible. It should go down in history as Rupert Murdoch’s War as well, and thus becomes by far the most significant historical event ever to be shaped by the Murdoch media.

How ironic it would be if it were not, in the end, a war Rupert Murdoch particularly wanted.

Murdoch perhaps signaled his displeasure at Kristol’s conflict mismanagement by selling the Standard to Philip Anschutz in 2009. That was the same year Michael Wolff published The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, reviewed in TAC by Philip Weiss:

In the novel that Wolff makes of Murdoch’s life, the hero is no worse than the rest. The real reason he wants to buy the Wall Street Journal is not to suck the music out of it, as he seems to have done with the Times of London, but to please his “liberal-ish” wife, Wendi, who revels in media celebrity and packs her unglamorous husband into Prada suits. The Journal is meant to be a cultural counterweight to the property that makes Murdoch a lot of money but he can’t abide: Fox News, led by his “monster,” Roger Ailes, and someone else Murdoch “despises,” the “bullying, mean-spirited” Bill O’Reilly.

And so, after 400 pages, Murdoch, whom Wolff unconvincingly styles as an outsider in an effort to jazz the reader’s interest, has become the Obama-loving blue-state insider.

McConnell and Weiss have much more, so check out their pieces.

The American Conservative is among the smaller magazines that benefitted from a presence at Borders. As TAC contributing editor Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted earlier this week, responding to the news of the Borders liquidation, “Sad. I discovered the magazine I would eventually work for at a Borders newsstand.”

Michael didn’t say whether he took the opportunity to purchase a copy of the magazine, though — and in my own unscientific observation of the Borders newsstands, there was much discovery and browsing of magazines, but relatively little purchasing. In one Borders location I frequented, the newsstand was immediately adjacent to the coffee counter, and the store’s staff didn’t seem to mind when customers took a stack of unpurchased magazines into the cafe, read for an hour or two, and then returned them to the rack. The store perhaps made a a few nickels selling the customer a cup of coffee. But with Borders becoming like a branch of the public library, it was a business model that seemed doomed to fail.

Some bookstores fought back against the newsstand freeloaders. Some years ago, I visited a downtown branch of Olsson’s, a small DC-area chain, that had installed something resembling a communion rail between the cafe and the printed material; the physical barrier was accompanied by a large sign requiring customers to purchase books or magazines before sitting in the cafe area. Olsson’s later went out of business.

The demise of Borders, and the attendant loss of their large newsstands, is likely to be seen by many as part of the inevitable transition from printed media to the brave new digital frontier. But there is something to be mourned in losing the serendipitous opportunities that a newsstand enables. A physical bazaar of printed material, edited and presented in a way still unmatched by the web or eReader, magazine racks provide a respite from our constant tanning in front of  glowing screens as we surf across the blogosphere. Like much of the chattering class, I used to sneer at the soulless quality of the bookstore chains — but when it comes to those long racks of colorful and varied journals, I will miss Borders.

Coogan, himself a victim of phone-hacking, rounded his condemnation with “you’re just trying to find out who’s sleeping with who.” So, it seems, not only were the paper’s methods underhand and immoral, but its priorities were crass and the truth it sought to uncover mere “title-tattle,” as the broadcaster and equally irate Newsnight guest Greg Dyke chose to put it.

Rupert Murdoch’s closure of News of the World after 168 years of circulation has widely been celebrated as a victory for good taste. The tabloid pedaled a lurid blend of sensationalist news coverage mixed with scoops about celebrity drug and sex scandals. It was a publication no self-respecting metropolitan middle-class man or woman would be caught dead with, a shame comparable with being spotted in the terraces of a greyhound race wearing a string vest while chugging on a Strongbow cider can.

Still, the paper’s folding is being lauded by the press as a vindication of moral principle, and the result of popular anger. Its appalling conduct in hacking into the phones of the general public, let alone those of politicians and celebrities, has received the attention and condemnation that it deserves. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that the near-Victorian moral crusade against “this sort of journalism” – namely, invasive tabloids that cater to the public’s base hunger for the details of celebrity misdemeanor – is at root a media-led outrage. It is a class war of sorts, waged by the high-brow, broadsheet establishment against this “lower” form of journalism from which they try to distance themselves.

The distinction is crucial, forming the basis of the journalistic elite’s moral authority as enlightened political and social commentators. Frank Furedi, writing in Spiked Online, elaborates on this “cultural elite’s crusade”:

Time and again, journalists claim to have detected a powerful public revulsion against the machinations of News International. […] In truth, this ‘public fit of morality’ is actually confined to a relatively narrow stratum of British society. […] Depicting a media insider-led coup as an expression of people power is a self-serving fantasy. Will history characterise a campaign from above which involved a few hundred people and which succeeded in shutting down a newspaper read by millions as an expression of people power? I think not.

Yet despite the moral panic liberals claim over the bigotry and ignorance the right-wing rag is breeding among the (invariably passive) lower orders, there is smug comfort in their disdain. Among well-educated left-leaning circles, expressing outrage over a recent headline (“did you see that xenophobic filth in the Mail today?”) is effective short-hand for establishing one’s enlightened liberal credentials; and “Daily Mail reader” has become a popular class pejorative to designate a narrow-minded somebody of the aspirant working or lower middle classes. Much the same validating function is provided by Fox News for U.S. liberals, in providing a ready-to-mock caricature of the Forces of Ignorance against which they are nobly pitted.

Here’s an example of the fun to be had with the “Daily Fail”:

But it appears that the Mail might not be quite so lamentably British as all that. In the vast, loss-making fight towards internet hegemony that established newspapers have been waging, the Mail has come out trumps; and not just in Britain. The MailOnline is now the world’s second most popular news site, having overtaken The Huffington Post, and sits awkwardly behind the high-brow liberal opinion-maker The New York Times. Yet, its rise being exponential, some predict that it will take the top spot some time this summer, in which case the world really isn’t safe for democracy.

The curious thing is, a large swathe of its online readership is American, the U.S. edition offering a similarly sensationalist take on American affairs alongside the obligatory celebrity/cancer/housing-market guff. This led Rod Liddle to muse in The Spectator on what the American character shares with the British:

it transpires that [the Mail's] audience’s taste in news, in how it views the world, is not quite so uniquely British as many had thought or hoped. The Americans are just as atavistically bitter and vengeful and unhappy as we are, just as scared of horrible diseases and as susceptible, in their lighter moments, to meaningless sleb bilge, just as transfixed about what their house is worth today, tomorrow and the day after.

In America’s enthusiasm for what has long been perceived as a parochial British tabloid, more a dirty family secret than a news outlet, we are perhaps witnessing a different register of Anglophilia than that which overtook America at the time of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, when countless whole families jumped out of bed early to watch the ceremony live. America’s strange fondness for the quainter elements of the British aristocracy, and its Royal family in particular, is well known. But with the bizarre stateside success of the MailOnline, Americans are displaying an equally eager appetite for the interests, fears and foibles of Britain’s much-derided working and lower middle classes. The “shared culture” operates at many levels, and the Forces of Ignorance can’t be quarantined within British hamlet towns.