Warning stickers for the Daily Mail

England's Daily Mail isn't just a source of funny Internet posts, it's also a veritable font of hysterical, nutso reporting about "epidemics" of child abuse, immigration, welfare cheats, violent crime, etc and so forth. They're not solely responsible for the rise of authoritarianism and surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties here, but they're sure in the vanguard. Here's some sticker template for decorating the free copies of the Wail that you encounter in your life.

I wish these were a) funnier and b) better designed. I have a feeling that, like the cigarette-pack ads they're meant to ape, they're just going to come across as finger-wagging. Got ideas for improving them? Hit the comments.

Take back our country from right-wing tabloids (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

• [Roy Trumbull]

  Printed on recycled used toilet paper.
  Don’t confuse content with truth.
  The Loo of the dailies.

• [Deidzoeb]

  takebackourcountry.org.uk not to be confused with the US tea party site http://www.retakeourgov.com

• [wvoyek]

  Billy Bragg sang about this over 25 years ago.

  “When you wake up to the fact that your paper is Tory
  Just remember there are two sides to every story.”

  Now I need to go find that LP.

• [Tyrsfist]

  Wow, really? We need warnings for the Daily MAIL? REALLY? That rags been a joke since before the old British comedies were new.

  Maybe we should worry about people believing the Weekly World News next?

  Also, Fox news is biased. So are all the other channels. The only place to see unbiased coverage of your news is on some other countries news programs, ideally someone who doesn’t give a damn about your country.

  God I miss the International news channel we used to have. NHK’s reporting of the US news was, unlike Fox/NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN/Any US Channel, unbiased. The BBC’s Coverage of American Politics was also pretty nice. The BBC’s coverage of British Politics? Perhaps not so clean. Why? Because they (the reporters, the news writers, the anchors) have a personal, emotional investment in their own countries politics.

• [Xenu]

  Too bad you can’t post a warning on a TV channel (or can you?)

  Fox News needs a similar warning label.

  • [Cowicide]

    There’s a bank my friend banks at that has Fox “News” blasting every day (it’s a corporate way to artificially boost ratings for Fox, but that’s a whole nudder story). I’d like to stick the label right at the bottom where the control panel is.

    • [zerode]

      Regarding the bank playing Fox News – or waiting rooms showing Oprah or whatever – the solution I’ve adopted is to use the Micro Spy Remote from ThinkGeek which allows you to mute, change the channel or shut off most TVs, discretely.

      As far as the stickers go, I am reminded of the stickering campaigns against “war toys” – going through Toys R US and putting stickers on all the guns, etc. warning that “war toys make violent men” or something like that…

• [Anonymous]

  They are modeled after cigarette-pack ads ?

  You guys have pretty boring warnings on your packets. How would you expect them to be effective ?

  These are our ones:
  http://www.wallabydown.com/articles/2008/03/images/cigs.png

  They are actual cigarette packets.

• [SamSam]

  I think the format makes sense if placed on one of the top corners of the front page. It makes it look like it’s part of the newspaper. It’s just like the New York Times’s “All the news that’s fit to print.”

  I think that makes it work better. You think it’s part of the newspaper, then you do a double-take.

• [proletariat]

  Freepress.net distributes a Media Reform Toolkit which has some striking decals on page 12.

  In this vein, a number of years ago, I pasted bright orange warning labels on the sides of newspaper vending machines in downtown Seattle that read something like “WARNING: Corporate media exists to make a profit and may exploit your fears and prejudices to do so.”

• [musicman]

  The design reminds me a lot of the early internet phenomenon Un American Activities. As someone who ripped off UAA designs and posted them up around Melbourne, Australia, I have a fondness for it I guess. Of course, this was back in the day when the beauty of his posters was that they were easy to imitate in early word processing programs…we are talking windows ’95 era after all…

• [jfrancis]

  Putting text wall-to-wall in a thick-bordered black box makes it less readable, not more so. That’s why the cigarette companies do it.

• [Anonymous]

  Warning: Contains panic, a known cause of failure.

• [Anonymous]

  These clowns think that /right wing tabloids/ are the big millstone around Britain’s neck at the moment? No accounting for the cognitive dissonance of creative types, is there?

• [blurgh]

  Grrr! Those hysterical nutsos! Getting worked up about things they don’t understand! Those unthinking idiots who disagree with my worldview! The way they’re so closed and bigoted and just won’t engage with reasoned debate!

  It makes me angry every time. I think I’ll print off some abusive stickers. That’ll show ‘em who’s clever and liberal and logical.

  • [Andrew W]

    There is a difference between having a different point of view, and inventing crisis out of whole cloth to advance your ideology. The first one is fine. The second one is what the Hate Mail does.

• [Anonymous]

  Our local independent candidate his the following in their manifesto:
  2) The Daily Mail should be forced to print on the front of every edition the words “This is a fictionalized account of the news and any resemblance to the truth is entirely coincidental.”

  might get my vote…

• [loonquawl]

  Funny how some of them could be self-referential bumper stickers: ‘Believing this paper harms you and others around you’

• [13strong]

  Again, the Daily Mail, while probably more popular in England, is not an English paper.

  It’s a British one.

  Seriously, Cory, you’ve been living in the UK long enough to not make that mistake any more.

  • [Raj77]

    Cory’s closer to right than you are, 13strong. The Daily Mail exists in England and Wales; Scotland and Ireland have their own editions, while Northern Ireland has a slightly altered version of the E&W one.

    • [13strong]

      Er. No. The Scottish Daily Mail is a slightly tweaked version of the England/Wales one, which contains almost entirely the same content and espouses exactly the same editorial/journalistic slant (i.e. rabid bigotry and fearmongering).

      So he’s still mistaken. Unless for some reason Cory has a problem with the England/Wales Daily Mail and not the Scottish one?

• [Anonymous]

  Can we get some of those for the Guardian? But you know, with all the bugbear words the right uses instead?

  • [13strong]

    The Guardian is hardly the left-wing equivalent of the Daily Mail. That you think they’re the same says a lot about the extremity of your world view.