Is the Daily Mail trying to scare us to death?
From the newspaper that brought you ‘Poison in the kitchen…How tap water could damage your brain, blind or even kill you’:
“You can’t switch them off. They’re packed with inflammable insulation that can give off toxic gas. Meet the most dangerous appliance of all…
Could your fridge burn your house down?“
So yells the Daily Mail, which presumably starts with the headlines, then goes looking for supporting material.
It could be argued that an electric fireplace is a more ‘dangerous appliance’ than a fridge. Or a gas cooker.
In fact, the Mail can’t seem to make up its mind.
On June 14 the paper revealed ‘How your washing machine or dishwasher could set your house on fire’.
A month earlier, it was dishwashers again: ‘Do you have a danger dishwasher? Hundreds of thousands of fire risk appliances’.
In October it was ovens:
‘Is there a killer in your kitchen? Ovens linked to the gassing of ten people. Fridges and tumble dryers blamed for house fires.’
In 2010 the paper reported on
‘Killers in your kitchen: Gender-bending packaging, exploding floor cleaners and toasters more deadly than sharks‘.
In 2013 the Mail said ‘Millions of death-trap appliances are sitting in homes‘, while in 2014 it revealed, er, ‘Millions of dangerous electrical devices are lurking in homes‘.
Don’t you just hate it when electrical devices ‘lurk’?
Meanwhile, the Mail’s worthless health pages have warned that too much sleep can kill you, and asked important questions about sausages.
On and on it goes. As the Mail might put it,
Is the Daily Mail trying to scare us to death?
There may well be a problem with fridges bursting into flames, and journalism can be an essential tool in protecting people from dangerous products.
But this does not require that a newspaper try to frighten people or treat them like idiots.
Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
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25 Responses to “Daily Mail says fear your fridge – ‘the most dangerous appliance of all’”
Jon Jones.
Nothing to do with being left or right. It’s just a bad newspaper. A nasty tabloid pretending to be a serious read.
Jon Jones.
Nothing to do with being left or right. It’s just a bad newspaper. A nasty tabloid pretending to be a serious read.
Alex Mawgan
I had a free edition of the CSM on my kindle a while back and I thought it was good, too. I don’t have the cash for subscriptions though, I just go for BBC, Garudian, Guido and LFF and a couple of other easiy-loadable sites on the basic internet I normally get on the kindle. Ican’t usually comment here because live in Peru and take what I can get on 3G, but I’m back in Europe and flaunting my stuff for a month or two!
As long as you know where the rag you’re reading’s allegiances lie, and surely everybody does, you’re OK. I’m sure this Media Watch could be closed down without any effect on anything, or put the effort into discerning how many of Polly Toynbee’s articles are churned out from the villa in Tuscany… Hipocrasy lives nearby…
Jon Jones.
To be fair mate, in the UK there is a massive imbalance in the left/right press so I can’t be too hard on LFF. Call me naive but I want the press to just report the news – not make it. I genuinely believe the rightwing press is out of control.
The Mailonline is both the Uk’s and the worlds most read online paper and it’s nothing more than a Tory mouthpiece. In the 18 months leading up to the election it was all pro-UKIP anti-Europe, anti-migration (although it seems happy with the 3 million UK citizens that migrate each year)
But as soon as the election started to gear up proper it did nothing but attack UKIP. Their job was done, they had stirred up enough rightwing hate so it was back to backing the Tories.
A read a piece yesterday on the Mail about the crisis in Calais and the best rated comment was “Just bomb the camp” I mean come-on WTF?
Anyway sorry, a bit of rant but my point was LFF are in the minority so for them to shout louder is not so unforgivable.
Alex Mawgan
Rant away, it’s good for the soul. I couldn’t agree more about newspapers reporting rather than making news, and true about the imbalance towards the right in the paper press at the moment. I still find it weird how much the Sun loves George Osborne now – I think they (and the the Times and probably Sky News too) just flagrantly change their allegiance as the mood in the country changes, rather than actually setting the agenda.
Who was it who said, “I do like The Sun, but remember you should never look directly at it.”
Thanks for not jumping on my misspelling of hypocrisy – I haven’t talked about P.T. for a while and I’m getting rusty…