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Comment by vixen99 | Hacker News Reader

You read trash but I read light amusing gossip. The great thing about dissing the Mail is that you don't have to present any argument; you just toss in a few words and phrases like 'racist', 'trash' and 'immigrant-bashing' (defined as 'the slightest hint of criticism at all regarding immigration levels; add an argued case study and you really are in the gutter), add a dash of stock kitten-smear and the whackjob is done. You're on the high ground and the pathetic masses are on the low.

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If you'd like, I can dig up several instances of the daily mail being terrible (specifically, their reporting about 'soandso causes cancer', their use of single outrageous instances to infer non-existing trends, the horrendous way they treat their employees, their casual sexism, etc etc..) but that seems out of place in an article which is mostly concerned about machine learning and NLP.

I fully stand by the statement that the Daily Mail is a reactionary piece of trash that appeals to the lowest and basest sentiments of its readers though.

It's far more worrying than that. I worked for a pollster and it was obvious the DM was able to set an agenda and influence people based on the statistics collected.

It's a heavily weaponised tabloid capable of swinging a political victory here and there.

The parent poster is merely concerned about the surface area, not the consequences. If it is just words then its laughable but it represents influence and that is beyond dangerous.

> This year, the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had “targeted” Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming “rather than face a fresh medical”; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by windfarms was discarded. All these reports were false.

http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/12/man-who-hates-libe...

I would love to see work as described in the article leading to the ability to analyse and quantify the output of journalistic outlets in terms of political bias, accuracy and depth of reporting.

If we had a tool like this, maybe we'd be able to move away from some of the emotive language that we use when talking about outlets like the Mail.

Do you read it primarily online?

The DM people are quite smart. Their target demographics for the print version and the online version are very, very different. The online pitch is trashy gossip for women in the 20-40 age group. The print pitch is different.

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