Charlie Brooker: Daily Mail Dumbogeddon

I don’t read Charlie Brooker often enough, I quite enjoy his rather sharp commentaries. This is an old one, but appeared in my twitter stream earlier. The ‘dumbogeddon’ is the ironic responses of some Daily Mail commenters to an article suggesting that stupid people hold right-wing opinions to feel ‘safe’. It’s his description of the Daily Mail and Paul Dacre that tickled my ribs:

The print edition of the paper is edited by Paul Dacre, who is regularly praised by media types for knowing what his customers want, and then selling it to them. This is an extraordinary skill that puts him on the same rarefied level as, say, anyone who works in a shoe shop. Or a bike shop. Or any kind of shop. Or in any absolutely any kind of business whatsoever. Whatever you think about Dacre’s politics, you can’t deny he’s got a job to do, and he does it. Like a peg. Or a ladle. Or even a knee. Dacre is perhaps Britain’s foremost knee.

Curiously, the online version of the Mail has become a hit by doing the reverse of what Dacre is commended for doing. It succeeds by remorselessly delivering industrial quantities of precisely the opposite of what a traditional Mail reader would presumably want to read: frothy stories about carefree young women enjoying themselves. Kim Kardashian or Kelly Brook “pour their curves” into a selection of tight dresses and waddle before the lens and absolutely nobody on the planet gives a toss apart from Mail Online, which is doomed to host the images, and Mail Online’s readers, who flock in their thousands to leave messages claiming to be not in the slightest bit interested in the story they’re reading and commenting on.

Teehee.

And yes, any excuse to add a photo of Kelly Brook 😉