Let the Daily Mail know you care about comment integrity
It seems the Daily Mail aren’t keen on criticism. According to Martin Belam, his comment posted on a Daily Mail story, ‘ Suicide generation: five-year-olds calling helpline‘, was edited to remove a line criticising the paper’s reporting:
The published comment reads:
“If you actually read the report ChildLine issued, it does not say that suicidal five year olds called ChildLine. It says that there were 42 phone calls by children between the ages of 5 AND 11. The other 96% of suicidal calls were by children 12 and over – which whilst it is still very sad.
- Martin Belam, Salzburg, Austria”
As Martin points out, he “appears to trail off mid-sentence. What I actually submitted was:
“The other 96% of suicidal calls were by children 12 and over – which whilst it is still very sad is nowhere near the picture of suicidal 5 year olds portrayed in this article.”
This is cowardly, against the spirit in which comments are invited, and I can’t think of any excuse the Mail can give. Space isn’t an issue here, nor is offensiveness or even grammar. If their only reason is to protect the ‘good name’ of their paper, they’ve scored a big own goal – as censoring commenters will create more bad publicity than any comment itself would. And that starts here – I invite you to go to the story and post a comment of your own criticising their comment ‘moderation‘. Will they publish them?
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