Daily Mail

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 4th of May 1896, Alfred Harmsworth launched a newspaper in London that cost half a penny when every rival charged a full penny. The planned first print run was 100,000 copies. The actual run was 397,215, and still the presses could not keep up. Within three years circulation had reached 500,000. By 1902, at the close of the Boer Wars, it topped a million, making it the largest-circulation newspaper in the world.

  That newspaper was the Daily Mail. In the century that followed, it would reshape British journalism, champion aviation prizes, endorse fascist movements, help inspire a Beatles song, and accumulate a record number of libel payouts. It would also become, uniquely among major British dailies, a paper whose majority of readers were women. How did a halfpenny sheet grow into one of the most influential and most contested newspapers in the English-speaking world? That is what this documentary sets out to examine.

• 2. The Harmsworth Formula

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  Alfred Harmsworth and his brother Harold designed the Mail to be faster, cheaper, and more entertaining than anything London had seen. Where rival broadsheets leaned heavily on political speeches and parliamentary reports, the Mail offered human interest stories, serials, features, and competitions. Lord Salisbury, the 19th-century Prime Minister, dismissed it as "a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys."

  The brothers divided responsibility from the start: Harold ran the business side, Alfred served as editor. That combination produced a paper with commercial instincts woven into every page. The Mail was the first British newspaper to recognise the female reader as a distinct market, creating a dedicated women's interest section from the outset. It also hired one of the first female war correspondents, Sarah Wilson, who reported from the Second Boer War.

  By 1900, the paper was printing simultaneously in Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to achieve that feat. In 1899, the Mail had organised special trains to carry London-printed papers north; within a year it had built its own northern press. The production method was so effective that the Daily Sketch adopted it in 1909, the Daily Express in 1927, and eventually nearly every other national title followed.

  In 1906, the Mail offered £10,000 for the first flight from London to Manchester and £1,000 for the first cross-Channel flight. Punch magazine, finding the notion absurd, offered its own £10,000 prize for the first flight to Mars. By 1910, both of the Mail's prizes had been claimed, and the paper continued awarding aviation prizes sporadically until 1930.

• 3. Rothermere and the Fascist Years

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  When Alfred Harmsworth died in August 1922 at age 57, his brother Harold, now Lord Rothermere, took full control of the paper. Rothermere held a fundamentally elitist conception of politics, distrusting both women voters and working-class men, and he had begun to lose faith in democracy itself.

  Shortly after the Nazis scored their breakthrough in the Reichstag elections on the 14th of September 1930, winning 107 seats, Rothermere travelled to Munich to interview Hitler. He published an article in the Daily Mail on the 24th of September 1930, writing that German youth had discovered "that it is no good trusting the old politicians" and that he would like to see British youth form a similar parliamentary movement. He urged the British not to adopt an attitude of hostility toward the Nazi party.

  Rothermere's 1933 leader "Youth Triumphant" praised the new Nazi regime's accomplishments and was subsequently used as propaganda by the regime. In it, Rothermere predicted that "the minor misdeeds of individual Nazis would be submerged by the immense benefits the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany." Journalist John Simpson later suggested that Rothermere was using the phrase "minor misdeeds" to describe violence against Jews and Communists.

  On the 15th of January 1934, Rothermere published an article titled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts," praising Oswald Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine" and directing young men to write to BUF headquarters on the King's Road, Chelsea. The Spectator responded that Blackshirts, like the Daily Mail, "appeal to people unaccustomed to thinking" and that the average Mail reader was a "potential Blackshirt ready made." In April 1934, the paper ran a competition called "Why I Like The Blackshirts," awarding one pound a week for the best letter.

  The paper's support for the BUF ended after violence at a rally at Kensington Olympia in June 1934. Its correspondent George Ward Price, who was later called "the lackey of Mussolini, Hitler and Rothermere" by journalist Wickham Steed, was one of the few British journalists trusted by both fascist leaders to take a reliably favourable tone.

• 4. Wartime Storms and a Controversial Voice

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  The Mail's instinct for confrontation predated Rothermere. During the First World War, in May 1915, Alfred Northcliffe criticised Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, over the supply of weapons and munitions. Kitchener was then regarded by many as a national hero. The paper's circulation collapsed from 1,386,000 to 238,000. Fifteen hundred members of the London Stock Exchange burned unsold copies and called for a boycott. Prime Minister H. H. Asquith accused the paper of disloyalty.

  When Kitchener died, the Mail reported his death as a great stroke of luck for the British Empire. The paper then turned on Asquith's conduct of the war, and he resigned in December 1916. His successor David Lloyd George invited Northcliffe to join the cabinet precisely to neutralise his criticism. Northcliffe declined.

  The historian Piers Brendon offered a measured verdict on Northcliffe's methods: he had made the Mail the most commercially successful newspaper in the history of journalism, but "by confusing gewgaws with pearls, by selecting the paltry at the expense of the significant, by confirming atavistic prejudices" and "by blurring the difference between news and views, Northcliffe titillated, if he did not debouch, the public mind; he polluted, if he did not poison, the wells of knowledge."

  During the Suez crisis of 1956, the Mail consistently took a hardline against President Gamal Abdel Nasser, supporting Britain's right to invade Egypt and topple him. The paper was eventually transformed in the 1970s and 1980s under editor David English, who had previously edited the Daily Sketch before its closure in 1971. English raised the Mail's circulation from roughly half that of the Daily Express to surpassing it by the mid-1980s, and was knighted in 1982.

• 5. Coining a Word, Winning a War

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  In 1906, a journalist named Charles E. Hands used the word "suffragette" in the Mail to mock women campaigning for the right to vote, particularly members of the WSPU. Hands intended derision. The women he targeted embraced the label instead, emphasising the hard "g" in "suffraGETtes" to signal not merely that they wanted the vote but that they intended to get it. A slur became a rallying cry.

  The Mail's record on journalism has produced some of its most consequential moments. On the 17th of January 1967, the paper ran a story about potholes titled "The holes in our roads," noting that Blackburn alone had 4,000 holes. John Lennon read that issue. He incorporated the Blackburn detail into "A Day in the Life" alongside an account of the death of Tara Browne, a 21-year-old socialite killed in a car crash on the 18th of December 1966, which had also appeared in the paper.

  In 1981, the Mail ran an investigation into the Unification Church, accusing it of destroying marriages and brainwashing converts. The Church sued for libel and lost heavily. A jury awarded the Mail a then-record £750,000. In 1983, the paper received a special British Press Award for its "relentless campaign against the malignant practices of the Unification Church."

  On the 14th of February 1997, the Mail published a front page naming five men accused of the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence with the word "MURDERERS" as its headline, stating that if it was wrong, the men should sue. Two of those named were found guilty in 2012. After the verdict, Lawrence's parents and numerous political figures thanked the newspaper for accepting the financial risk that headline represented.

• 6. Lawsuits, Corrections, and the Reliability Question

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  Alan Sugar received £100,000 in damages from the Mail in February 2001 following a story about his stewardship of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Elton John received £100,000 in May 2006 over false accusations about his manners. J. K. Rowling received "substantial damages" in May 2014 over a false claim about a story she had written for the website of Gingerbread, a single-parents' charity. Melania Trump sued for $150 million over claims the paper had made about her past, and the Mail settled for an undisclosed amount in April 2017.

  In December 2017, the Mail published a front-page story about an Iraqi man named Abd Ali Hameed al-Waheed under the headline "Another human rights fiasco!", describing him as having been "caught red-handed with bomb." The trial judge had concluded that the bomb claim was "pure fiction." In July 2018, the Independent Press Standards Organisation ordered the paper to publish a front-page correction. The Mail subsequently said it had sent "strongly worded disciplinary notes" to seven senior staff members, warning that careers would be at risk if errors of the same nature recurred.

  In February 2017, the English Wikipedia voted to ban the Daily Mail as a citable reliable source. Ben Goldacre, writing in The Guardian, summarised the paper's science coverage as an "ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into ones that either cause or prevent cancer." A study cited in the paper in October 2011 about cannabis and schizophrenia prompted the co-author of the original research, Matt Jones, to state that the article did NOT say what the Mail claimed; the headline was later amended.

  On the 4th of December 2024, the Mail published a story about North Korean soldiers in Ukraine accompanied by a photograph that was later revealed to show two Russian soldiers whose facial features had been doctored to appear Korean. The paper removed the article and issued a correction notice after the manipulation was identified.

• 7. Scale, Structure, and Readership

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  The Mail switched from broadsheet to compact format on the 3rd of May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding, on the same day it absorbed the Daily Sketch. By February 2020 it had an average daily circulation of 1.13 million copies. Between April 2019 and March 2020 its average daily readership was approximately 2.18 million, and its website drew more than 218 million unique visitors per month in 2020.

  A survey in 2014 found the average age of its readers was 58. Among the major British dailies, the Mail had the lowest proportion of readers aged 15 to 44. Its readership profile is distinctive in one respect that no other major British daily can claim: women make up the majority, accounting for 52 to 55 percent of all readers.

  In May 2020, the Daily Mail ended The Sun's 42-year reign as the United Kingdom's highest-circulation newspaper, recording average daily sales of 980,000 copies. The paper has won the National Newspaper of the Year award from The Press Awards nine times since 1994, and the Society of Editors named it Daily Newspaper of the Year for 2020.

  In November 2021, Ted Verity took on a new seven-day role as editor of Mail newspapers, overseeing the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, and You magazine. Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, a great-grandson of one of the paper's original co-founders, remains the chairman and controlling shareholder of its parent company. The family chain stretches back unbroken to the halfpenny sheet of 1896.