The Daily Mail And Grenfell Tower

The Daily Mail and Grenfell TowerIn America, when we hear the word “tabloid,” publications such as People, US Weekly, and other grocery store checkout counter fodder come to mind. No one who considers themselves a respectable news-consumer would be caught dead trying to get hard news from those glossy magazine pages. However, in the United Kingdom, tabloids are highly-regarded and for the most part, reliable sources of hard news, read by millions of people across the country. One of the most popular papers is the Daily Mail. Founded in 1896, the Daily Mail is ranked as the UK’s second largest daily tabloid newspaper, behind The Sun, selling a daily average of 1,383,932 copies as of November 2017. The Mail was an immediate success following its first publication. It was “the first newspaper in Britain that catered for a new reading public that needed something simpler, shorter and more readable than those that had previously been available.

Considerable space was given to sport and human interest stories. It was also the first newspaper to include a woman’s section that dealt with issues such as fashions and cookery. Most importantly, all its news stories and articles were short,” according to Spartacus Educational. In British media culture, the consumption of news is highly politicized—by this I mean, most major news outlets can be placed on a scale of how they lean politically, left to right. For example, a paper such as The Guardian is known as quality news for the Liberal opinion with ties to the British Labor Party, whereas The Daily Telegraph features a more, politically-speaking, ‘right’ agenda. The Mail is no exception. The paper had, and maintains to this day, a close relationship with the British Conservative Party.

The London reporter Alfred Harmsworth, who founded the paper along with his brother, Harold, wanted to show support for the current leaders of the Conservative Party through producing and covering stories in line with their, and the party’s, political views and values. Arthur Balfour, who was the head of the Conservative Party in the House of Commons at the time, even sent a letter to Alfred thanking him: “Though it is impossible for me, for obvious reasons, to appear among the list of those who publish congratulatory comments in the columns of the Daily Mail perhaps you will allow me privately to express my appreciation of your new undertaking. That, if it succeeds, it will greatly conduce to the wide dissemination of sound political principles, I feel assured…”Over the years, these political ties led to the Mail’s biased and partisan coverage of economic and social issues. The political associations and conservative agenda of the Daily Mail, as well as their stance on immigration and race, are evident in their coverage of the recent UK tragedy, the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower. On June 14, 2017, the Grenfell Tower, a 24-story, 221-foot tall residential housing block in North Kensington, London, caught fire.

The tower was built in 1974 as part of the Lancaster West housing estate and underwent renovations in 2016 to install new windows, aluminum composite cladding, and insulation, to add heating benefits and also improve the appearance of the building for its almost 350 residents. Just past midnight on June 14, a fire started from the fridge in the kitchen of an apartment on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower. Less than an hour later, a 999 call was made to the North Kensington fire brigade. “Flames from the fridge had engulfed the kitchen and were quickly licking out of [the] open window, setting fire to the insulation in the cavity between the building and its new cladding…when the firefighters arrived, a group of eight, they came up to Flat 16 and put out the fire in the kitchen. They didn’t notice that the flames going out of the window had allowed the fire to enter the cavity…. to act as a chimney and draw the flames upwards,” wrote Andrew O'Hagan in his piece about Grenfell in the London Review of Books. The morning of the fire, hours after it was finally over, images of the burning housing block were splashed across every newspaper in Britain, including the Daily Mail.

The Mail’s front page was similar with that of many other tabloids and news outlets. Their June 14, 2017, front page featured a full-length photo of the corner of Grenfell Tower ablaze with bright orange flames. The bottom left-hand corner had white text, which simply read: ‘How the hell could it happen? ’However, in the days following the horrific fire, as many news outlets tried to answer this question of ‘how,’ the Mail took a turn away from its peers. While most publications reported on the Grenfell residents’ prior complaints and concerns about the safety of the building, or the faulty insulation installed in 2016 which allowed the entire building to so easily catch fire, the Daily Mail chose to publish the name and photo of the Grenfell resident who lived on the fourth floor, “whose faulty fridge started tower inferno,” the Mail claimed. On June 15, 2017, the Mail’s online counterpart—MailOnline—published a story with the head: “The man ‘whose faulty fridge started tower inferno:’ Neighbour reveals how Ethiopian taxi driver raised the alarm when deadly blaze started in his fourth-floor kitchen. ” The language of this headline reveals a lot—the negative tone of the words reflects the implied blame on this one man, Behailu Kebede, for the entire building burning up.

The choice to include Kebede’s race boils him down to this on ‘definer,’ allowing the reader to make an unconscious association between immigrants and tragedy, something the Mail does frequently. This type of coverage is very much in line with the Mail’s other coverage and general attitude towards immigrants because historically, the Daily Mail is openly hostile in its reporting of immigrants. The Mail consistently publishes headlines such as, “Sickly immigrants add £1bn to NHS bill,” “Immigration has undermined UK culture and migrants have not integrated fully say four out of 10 Brits,” and “Immigration ‘causing housing crisis. ’”Three days later, most newspapers were still publishing follow-up stories about the 2016 refurbishment of Grenfell, where cost-cutting trumped safety and cheaper, flammable insulation was used in the building. The Times published a story on June 16, 2017, “US banned cladding that was used on Grenfell Tower; Material ruled unsafe for tall buildings; Criminal inquiry launched amid anger. ” The anger was many Grenfell residents who complained long before the fire happened that safety standards in the tower were being ignored.

The Guardian’s story on the same day read: “Cladding for Grenfell Tower was cheaper, more flammable option. Exclusive: Omnis Exteriors asked to supply cladding £2 cheaper a square metre than fire-resistant type, investigation finds. ”However, the Daily Mail again ignored the main problem and published a commentary article by Ross Clark on June 16, 2017, headed “So Did an Obsession with Green Targets Lead to Inferno? ” Instead of addressing the political and administrative mistakes and issues which caused and worsened the fire, the Mail continuously veered away from this, spreading rumors, not factual evidence. They again focused the blame elsewhere, in this case the environment, perpetuating their anti-climate agenda. The Grenfell Tower fire is a tragedy still looming over London today. The coverage of this, and many other events, in the British media can truly shape the way their readership and society as a whole view these situations. There is a massive portion of the British public who rely on tabloids, such as the Daily Mail, for their news, and their opinions of economic and social issues are molded by these papers’ coverage. Because most news outlets are so politicized with strong party ties, the consumer is able to choose which publication aligns with their beliefs and read the information tailored to them. This lack of objectivity is harmful, not only to the British public who aren’t properly informed, but especially to those, like the immigrants in Grenfell, whose lives are portrayed through this political filter and who see their world’s turned upside-down by this biased coverage.