The Guardian view on the Daily Mail and Brexit: a very public shift | Editorial

A new editor has abandoned the aggressive tone with which the Mail campaigned for Brexit. This reflects a change in the public mood

As a rule, it is a mistake for the press to write about itself. Journalists will always find journalism fascinating. But readers are not nearly so interested in media navel-gazing. If newspapers spent each day analysing one another, readers would rapidly lose interest, and rightly so. Yet the editorial in today’s Daily Mail about the Tory party and Brexit is such a striking change of course that an exception to normal self-restraint is in order.

The headline on its leader – “Saboteurs endangering the nation” – may have seemed like normal Daily Mail fare. This was the newspaper, after all, which in its “Who will speak for England?” headline in 2016 pushed David Cameron aside and placed itself firmly at the head of the leave campaign; which used stories like “Plans to let 1.5m Turks into Britain” to make leave’s final push explicitly anti-migrant; which charged Britain’s impartial judges with being “Enemies of the people” for ruling that parliament was sovereign in the Brexit process; which welcomed Theresa May’s 2017 election launch with a call to “Crush the saboteurs”; and which, under the snarling headline “Proud of yourselves?”, excoriated 11 Tory MPs who backed a meaningful vote on Brexit for their “treachery”.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2yxegse