Is the Daily Mail the News?

After raising the question whether reading the Daily Mail can be considered as keeping up with the news or not in my last blog post, I decided the question is worth to take a closer look at.

Taking a closer look at Daily Mail’s homepage their main emphasis becomes clear quite quickly. Even though there are sections like “health”, “money” and “science”, the tabloid character of Daily Mail cannot be missed.

Headlines, which sound rather dramatic, are all over the front page. As a native German I am reminded of the German “newspaper” Die Bild. After reading Die Bild you are not much more informed what is going on in the world but you know about the latest sports results and which celebrity wasn’t dressed appropriate. Being a reader of Die Bild is sometimes even a synonym for being dumb. Considering the homepages are quite similar I guess the news stories are as well.

I think reading Die Bild or The Daily Mail is no problem if you are aware of the fact that those are more or less tabloids that are published daily and there are other, much more serious, news out there as well. All in all I think reading those kind of papers cannot be considered keeping up with the news. Sometimes when I’m bored I read them too, but just for entertainment reasons. For the same reasons I spent sometimes hours on end on BuzzFeed. But in the end I know those are not the “real” news that I need to know about to be a functional member of society.