LogFAQs > #965188758

Also regarding the Daily Mail discourse - first of all, let's understand that both the Daily Mail and New York Post are reactionary tabloid tags whose main function is to sensationalize news stories to whip their audiences into a frenzy. The fact that CE has delved so deeply into NY Post article sources since I've started posting here is fucking stupid.

Secondly, if we're talking about the veracity of the Daily Mail, I have personal experience with them blowing up a fake story for clicks.

I live in a town with a high Muslim population. At one point, a guy got arrested for designing a missile system for ISIS - one guy who had moved here from Sydney, who was working on technology in his shed, who was arrested by the police thankfully. Fucked up thing to do, absolutely.

We had three news sources reporting on the culture of my town. The first one was A Current Affair, a "gotcha"-type tabloid news program that goes after dole bludgers and dodgy tradies. The second was the Daily Telegraph, a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that had previously painted my town as a radical extremist shithole where men were selling their daughters into child marriages. And the third was the Daily Mail.

These three news sources came to my town with the express goal of painting our town's Muslim population as a standoffish population who refused to assimilate into the community, and to outright state that tensions were at a tipping point and it felt like violence was going to erupt at any point. At least one of these news sources used the term "race war".

One dirty trick A Current Affair did was they had a man with a camera crew sitting outside a local business that was owned and run by a Muslim man. The crew blocked off the door so no customers would come in, and he kept opening and closing the front door to get the Muslim guy angry. They wanted footage of an angry Muslim man pushing them away and slamming the door in their face - I was working next door to the business, and my boss went over and gave them a piece of her mind.

Another dirty trick, which the Daily Telegraph pulled and which the Daily Mail ripped off for their article, was they put a reporter in the main Street to ask people loaded questions about the Muslim population and how aggressive they were. They were down the street all day, stopping people to ask them about the Muslim population.

And a majority of the people they stopped? The bulk of foot traffic in my town, on a busy weekday afternoon? They said that the Muslim population was fine and that they'd.nevwr had any problems with any Muslim residents of my town.

The sources they used in the article were two people - two elderly people with chips on their shoulders - talking about how there was going to be fighting in the streets because the Muslims weren't assimilating and because they were only getting angrier and more standoffish.

Keep in mind, a ton of Muslim families have lived here for as long as I have, or longer. My family moved here in 1996. These families have settled, they own businesses, I went to school with Muslim children from these families. They are as much a part of this community - perhaps moreso - than I am, or any other white person I know. And the majority of the people interviewed reflected that fact.

But they picked the two people who had something bad to say about Muslims to fluff up their news pieces about how my town was an extremist shithole where Muslims were about to start roving the town in gangs and beating any white person they saw. They painted it as a breeding ground for radicalisation and sharia law. A Current Affair spread that message state-wide, and The Daily Telegraph spread that message nation-wide.

The Daily Mail took that perspective to a global audience.

If you want to stand by the NY Post or the Daily Mail, go ahead. But you have to cop to the fact that both sources are sensationalized tabloids that lie and inflate claims to make an emotionally manipulative point to make you think the world is worse than it actually is, because they know if they can trap you in a worldview where every potential criminal is a gun-toting, child-stabbing monster, you will feel safer when a police officer bowls one of them over, gets gasoline on them and fires a taser that burns their fucking skin off.