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Media
Mail editor defends Moir’s Gately column
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 7 February 2012
So the rather scary Paul Dacre, the man who couldn’t look less like he edited the Daily Mail if he tried, was back in front of Brian Leveson and his gang yesterday as the always entertaining if probably ultimately pointless Leveson Inquiry into press ethics rumbles on.
In amongst his staunch defence of his paper – the second most read in the UK remember, and with the most read website of any newspaper in the world – Dacre was asked about that infamous column he published about Stephen Gately’s untimely demise, thrown together by one of the Mail’s top outrageous-opinions-for-hire columnists, the fat fingered pie reviewer Jan Moir.
As you may recall, in a column published shortly after Gately’s death and just before his funeral, Moir decreed that the gay singer’s sudden passing was almost certainly as a result of his homosexuality, ‘being gay’ famously causing the deaths of thousands of boyband singers every year. The piece caused outrage, 25,000 complaints to the PCC and an online campaign against the paper’s online advertisers.
Dacre conceded that the piece was badly timed, and should probably have been sub-edited so to be slightly more sensitive, adding that he probably would have requested such tweaks, but that he had left the office early the day before that particular edition was published and so hadn’t seen the column.
But, he added, the unprecedented level of outrage the piece generated was simply symbolic of the way Twitter and Facebook had provided a new forum through which the paper’s detractors could rally together, and, he noted, the Press Complaints Commission ultimately ruled the column did not breach its Editors’ Code. Moreover, Moir’s right to an opinion was sacrosanct, however much outrage it caused.
Dacre: “My view is that perhaps the timing was a little regrettable, [and] I think the column could have benefited from a little judicious sub-editing. But I would die in a ditch to defend a columnist’s right to have her views. There isn’t a homophobic bone in Jan Moir’s body”.
Of course Dacre is basically right, columnists should be allowed to speak their minds, even if some find their writing offensive – after all, calling Moir a “fat fingered pie reviewer” is a bit offensive. Though personally it’s not Moir’s opinions that offend me, it’s that her pieces are frequently ill-informed, and almost always terribly written, and yet Dacre and his readers seemingly lap her work up.
Plus suggesting that Gately’s sexuality was relevant to his death when all the evidence available at the time said otherwise is less of an opinion and more of a slur.
