A journalist from the London Daily Mail offered to pay for stories about children identify as animals. The replies are hilarious. The journalist, Helen Carroll deleted her tweet about two hours after posting it, but the internet has receipts …
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What started all this nonsense? A short exchange between 13-year-old 8th-grade students and their teacher discussing gender identity was posted on social media video site TikTok.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News picked up the story as part of their culture war against transgender people. The audio tape was given lead story status by Murdoch’s The Sun, and the Daily Mail began a series warning of outbreaks of “furries” in schools.
Within hours, the UK prime minister was being asked about it and the tories were demanding the school be urgently investigated in case there were “safeguarding issues”.
“The government is investigating a school where a 13-year-old girl was branded ‘despicable’ by her teacher for rejecting her fellow pupil’s request to be identified as a cat” warned the Mail, despite no-one identifying as a cat on the tape.
We can’t find the original tape on TikTok, but here’s a copy of the audio in one of the many social media posts …
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More replies to the Daily Mail journalist …
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— Stuart Dillon #COYI (@StuartDillon1) June 26, 2023 |
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The Guardian weighs in …
Nesrine Malik wrote about the anti-woke right wing media frenzy about furries and children identifying as cats in the Guardian earlier in the day, and it seems the Daily Mail was on a mission …
It doesn’t matter if a girl identified as a cat (she didn’t). The issue is how post-truth politics exploits it
By now, you may have heard that a girl in a school in Rye in East Sussex said she was a cat, that she “identified” as such, and that others who disagreed with her were chastised by a teacher. If you have come across this story, you would be entirely forgiven for thinking it was real.
“Catgirl: today’s culture of affirmation is failing children,” wailed the Telegraph. Nick Ferrari on LBC hosted a whole phone-in segment about the story. The Mail unveiled an “investigation” that revealed this was not an isolated incident, but part of a larger phenomenon where children are identifying as cats, dogs, dinosaurs and “furries”.
The problem isn’t anything as trite as an epidemic of “fake news”. Half-truths and full lies are more concerned with diverting political consciousness and consumption to the trenches of identity and lifestyle preoccupation, and away from more critical areas such as the political and economic decisions relating to our standard of living, and even the very education system that troubles the media because of a nonexistent cat child.
It helps that these stories are cheap to produce. They are mostly recycled copy and skimming the froth from social media. It helps that they sell well: fear always has a hot market.
The ratio kept coming for the Daily Mail journalist …
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What does getting ratioed on Twitter mean?
According to Urban Dictionary, being ratioed (sometimes spelt “ratio’d”) is when “a reply to a tweet gets more likes than the tweet it was replying to usually indicating the unpopularity or stupidity of the original tweet.” For example, if your tweet got 10 likes but a reply got 10,000 likes, you have sadly been “ratioed”.
The Daily Mail journalist, Helen Carroll deleted her tweet about two hours after posting it, but not before she was soundly ratioed.
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Trust in media plummets
The Digital News Report 2022 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) found that trust in the UK media has plummeted in recent years.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun was the UK’s least trusted news brand out of 15 major UK titles included in the survey, with 67% of people saying they didn’t trust its news output versus 12% who did.
The Daily Mail was second last on the list with 51% saying they don’t trust the newspaper compared to only 23% who do.
With ‘beat ups’ like this, we can’t see The Sun and The Daily Mail’s reputation being restored any time soon.
