"Trying to set a record for the most spammed email address of all time? Respect."
The Daily Mail has faced ridicule over its latest attempt to stoke a culture war over what it dubs ‘wokeism’. In a desperate bid to generate outrage stories, a Mail reporter has tweeted that the paper was “on the hunt for shocking examples of wokeism as part of The Mail’s new ‘Woke Watch’.”
In his callout, the reporter was clear the type of vital public interest stories the paper is after. “Has your school gone pronouns mad? Worried you’ve lost your freedom of speech at your university?”, he asked, before encouraging people with experience of either to get in touch with the Daily Mail.
The paper’s strategy for generating culture war style coverage has, naturally, been ruthlessly mocked.
Comedian Nish Kumar tweeted: “Trying to set a record for the most spammed email address of all time? Respect.” Trade unionist Dave Watson responded to the tweet to suggest the Mail should instead establish ‘poverty watch’ or ‘disinformation watch’, claiming the latter could come out of the paper’s advertising budget.
Others responded to the Mail‘s desperation by posting mock ‘woke’ stories that the Mail could consider running.
One Twitter user replied: “Hi Connor, I was just in a cafe and witnessed the barristas refuse to serve someone simply for the crime of being a white man. They insulted him demanded that he left. All the other customers booed and hissed at him as he meekly left. Truly these are chilling times.”
Another wrote: “I wish I’d seen this last December. My son was given a role in his school nativity where he played a refugee from the Middle East looking for shelter. More politically correct nonsense!”
Journalist Ash Sarkar tweeted: “Did you hear about the guy who sells coffee priced as soup to white people, but the manager can’t do anything because otherwise they’ll get called racist?”
As Left Foot Forward’s Right Wing Watch project regularly chronicles, these suggestions aren’t too far removed from the farcical culture warring the right wing papers get up to every week.
Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward
Image credit: Alex Muller – Creative Commons
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