Mail gets confused, prints story undermining its very existence

[Webbo]

Anyone who mixes with working class people will know that the idea that Labour voters, who certainly wouldn't describe themselves as right wing, aren't racist is laughable.

This seems to me, like a lot of science today, to be a case of we'll decide what we believe and then prove ourselves right.

[Alexikokopops]

Anyone who mixes with working class people will know that the idea that Labour voters, who certainly wouldn't describe themselves as right wing, aren't racist is laughable.

This seems to me, like a lot of science today, to be a case of we'll decide what we believe and then prove ourselves right.

If they're doing it right it shouldn't be, but I'm never sure how much to trust the way the tests were set up, or how they're actually presenting the results. The classic example is the bacon cancer one here.

[Captain...]

Anyone who mixes with working class people will know that the idea that Labour voters, who certainly wouldn't describe themselves as right wing, aren't racist is laughable.

This seems to me, like a lot of science today, to be a case of we'll decide what we believe and then prove ourselves right.

The study was not based on how you vote though, you can vote for Labour but that doesn't mean you don't identify with right wing ideology, especially considering that Labour is closer to the conservatives in ideology than socialism, or even what the Lib Dems are supposed to stand for. I'm sure a lot of people will vote for Labour in working class areas because of their association with the unions and through a hatred of the Tories and Thatcher than actually having a left wing ideology.

[21st Century Fox]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/05/daily-mail-calls-rightwingers-stupid

In terms of enraging your core readership, this is the equivalent of Nuts magazine suddenly claiming only gay men masturbate to Hollyoaks babes.

[Daggers]

Anyone who mixes with working class people will know that the idea that Labour voters, who certainly wouldn't describe themselves as right wing, aren't racist is laughable.

This seems to me, like a lot of science today, to be a case of we'll decide what we believe and then prove ourselves right.

[Zingari]

Quote from the article

'Individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate towards more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo. 'It provides a sense of order.'

Basically all the study reveals is that people of lower intelligence do not like change and are more inclined to want to "maintain the status quo".

Somehow they have managed to equate the desire to maintain the status quo with right wing politics .

How can this be ?

The status quo at any given time or place can be quite different . For instance the less intelligent in the former USSR may be more inclined to want to hang on to left wing ideology because that is their " status quo" that provides them with a sense of order .

They ought to nail this once and for all by asking all the guests on Jeremy Kyle which way they vote .

Using the the lie detector if necessary !!

[Captain...]

Quote from the article

'Individuals with lower cognitive abilities may gravitate towards more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo. 'It provides a sense of order.'

Basically all the study reveals is that people of lower intelligence do not like change and are more inclined to want to "maintain the status quo".

Somehow they have managed to equate the desire to maintain the status quo with right wing politics .

How can this be ?

The status quo at any given time or place can be quite different . For instance the less intelligent in the former USSR may be more inclined to want to hang on to left wing ideology because that is their " status quo" that provides them with a sense of order .

They ought to nail this once and for all by asking all the guests on Jeremy Kyle which way they vote .

Using the the lie detector if necessary !!

Only having the article to go on, which refers to a study back in the 1958 and a follow up in 1970, I am not sure if the sample questions in the article are really evidence of Right - wing ideology:

"In adulthood, the children were asked whether they agreed with statements such as, 'I wouldn't mind working with people from other races,' and 'I wouldn't mind if a family of a different race moved next door.'

They were also asked whether they agreed with statements about typically right-wing and socially conservative politics such as, 'Give law breakers stiffer sentences,' and 'Schools should teach children to obey authority.'"

I think the article and the study it is based on is largely bollox, but it is funny that the Mail printed it and the comments it generated are brilliant.

[Bellend Sebastian]

I think the article and the study it is based on is largely bollox, but it is funny that the Mail printed it and the comments it generated are brilliant.

That was really why I posted it, I'm surprised people are dissecting it in the way that they are because it doesn't look particularly credible, amused though I am by their supposed findings.

Does anyone know if it appeared in the print version?

[Webbo]

I think the article and the study it is based on is largely bollox, but it is funny that the Mail printed it and the comments it generated are brilliant.

People seem to think that the Mail exists to brainwash ordinary people into blaming the poor or are trying to clone Hitler and see a third Reich in Britain.The Mail like every other newspaper is a business, controversial articles like these increase readership and hits on their site. It's really not rocket science.

[Zingari]

That was really why I posted it, I'm surprised people are dissecting it in the way that they are because it doesn't look particularly credible, amused though I am by their supposed findings.

Does anyone know if it appeared in the print version?

ah yes , but it's very interesting that there are so many lefties that seem all too willing to believe that it is a credible study.

Maybe the Daily Mail is tricking them into some kind of double irony ( if there is such a thing )

edit ;

i think it may be socratic irony , but i'm not sure

[Rincewind]

Did not know the survey was done such a long time ago. Puts a new complextion on it. Not sure if it would be much different now though. Even New Labour are not Labour any more and Nick Clegg has sold his soul to be in bed with Cameron.

Its all Thatchers fault

[Daggers]

When the Daily Mail calls rightwingers stupid, the result is dumbogeddon

On and on the comments went – a chimps' tea party of the damned

• 
  

Look what you're missing: Kelly Brook in typical Mail Online mode. Photograph: Dave M. Benett/Getty

There was a minor kerfuffle a few weeks ago when the Daily Mail website overtook the New York Times to become the most popular news site in the world. Liberals can whine all they like, but that's a formidable achievement, especially considering it's not really a conventional news site at all, more a big online bin full of pictures of reality stars, with the occasional Stephen Glover column lobbed in to lighten the mood.

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.

Now Mail Online has gone one step further by running a story that not only insults its own readers, but cruelly invites them to underline the insult by making fools of themselves. In what has to be a deliberate act of "trolling", last Friday it carried a story headlined "Rightwingers are less intelligent than left wingers, says study". In terms of enraging your core readership, this is the equivalent of Nuts magazine suddenly claiming only gay men masturbate to Hollyoaks babes.

The Mail's report went on to detail the results of a study carried out by a group of Canadian academics, which appears to show some correlation between low childhood intelligence and rightwing politics. It also claimed that stupid people hold rightwing views in order to feel "safe". Other items they hold in order to feel safe include clubs, rocks and dustbin lids. But those are easy to let go of. Political beliefs get stuck to your hands. And the only way to remove them is to hold your brain under the hot tap and scrub vigorously for several decades.

As you might expect, many Mail Online readers didn't take kindly to a report that strived to paint them as simplistic, terrified dimwits. Many leapt from the tyres they were swinging in to furrow their brows and howl in anger. Others, tragically, began tapping rudimentary responses into the comments box. Which is where the tragi-fun really began.

"Stupidest study of them all," raged a reader called Beth. "So were the testers conservative for being so thick or were they left and using a non study to make themselves look better?" Hmmm. There's no easy answer to that. Because it doesn't make sense.

"I seem to remember 'academics' once upon a time stating that the world was flat and the Sun orbitted the Earth," scoffed Ted, who has presumably been keeping his personal brand of scepticism alive since the middle ages.

"Sounds like a BBC study, type of thing they would waste the Licence fee on, load of Cods wallop," claimed Terry from Leicester, thereby managing to ignore the findings while simultaneously attacking public service broadcasting for something it hadn't done. For his next trick, Terry will learn to whistle and shit at the same time.

Not all the respondents were stupid. Some were merely deluded. Someone calling themselves "Hillside" from Sydney claimed: "I have an IQ over 200, have six degrees and diplomas and am 'right-wing', as are others I know at this higher level of intelligence." His IQ score is particularly impressive considering the maximum possible score on Mensa's preferred IQ test is 161.

Whatever the numbers: intellectual dick-measuring isn't to everyone's tastes anyway. Simply by highlighting his own intelligence "Hillside" alienated several of his commentbox brethren.

"If there is one person I can not stand and that is a snob who thinks they are intelligent because if they were intelligent and educated they wouldn't be snobs," argued Liz from London. Once you've clambered over the broken grammar, deliberately placed at the start of the sentence like a rudimentary barricade of piled-up chairs, there's a tragic conundrum at work here. She claims intellectual snootiness is ugly, which it is, but unfortunately she says it in such a stupid way it's impossible for anyone smarter than a steak-and-ale pie not to look down on her. Thus, for Liz, the crushing cycle of snobbery continues.

On and on the comments went, turning a rather stark write-up of a daft-sounding study into a sublime piece of live online performance art. A chimps' tea party of the damned. The Mail has long been a master at trolling lefties; now it's mischievously turned on its own readers, and the results could only be funnier if the website came with free plastic lawn furniture for them to lob at the screen. You couldn't make it up.

Brilliant

[accessory]

People seem to think that the Mail exists to brainwash ordinary people into blaming the poor or are trying to clone Hitler and see a third Reich in Britain.

That's not true...

Hitler's was the third reich, so the next one would be the fourth..

[Captain...]

People seem to think that the Mail exists to brainwash ordinary people into blaming the poor or are trying to clone Hitler and see a third Reich in Britain.The Mail like every other newspaper is a business, controversial articles like these increase readership and hits on their site. It's really not rocket science.

It is a proudly right wing newspaper with right wing views and a largely rightwing readership, so to have an article saying that people with rightwing views are stupid is just insulting the readership base and indirectly saying that you are an idiot for reading the Mail.

As much as the controversial nature of the article could increase interest in the paper it is also as likely to drive people away,

Incidentally it was only on their website and not printed.

[Webbo]

It is a proudly right wing newspaper with right wing views and a largely rightwing readership, so to have an article saying that people with rightwing views are stupid is just insulting the readership base and indirectly saying that you are an idiot for reading the Mail.

As much as the controversial nature of the article could increase interest in the paper it is also as likely to drive people away,

Incidentally it was only on their website and not printed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/jan/25/dailymail-internet

The Daily Mail has become the leading online newspaper in the world, according to figures by the tracking service comScore.

[21st Century Fox]

http://www.guardian....lymail-internet

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.

[Webbo]

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.

That always makes me laugh too. I read Richard Littlejohns column just so I can read all the lefties slagging him off. They don't seem to realise they're putting up his ratings.

[Daggers]

It must be wonderful to live in a world where everything is black and white, right or left, Littlejohn or not a cvnt.