{"id":9100,"date":"2012-02-06T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T20:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/wildhunt\/?p=9100"},"modified":"2012-02-06T12:04:23","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T20:04:23","slug":"what-does-the-daily-mails-internet-success-mean-for-pagans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/wildhunt\/2012\/02\/what-does-the-daily-mails-internet-success-mean-for-pagans.html","title":{"rendered":"What Does The Daily Mail’s Internet Success Mean for Pagans?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

British tabloid The Daily Mail\u2019s website has become the most-visited newspaper site in the world<\/a>, surpassing The New York Times (though the Times disputes those numbers<\/a>). Analyzing the rise of the Mail Online, Will Oremus at Slate.com notes<\/a> that the site drifts away from the xenophobic nativism of its print version to focus on anything that will generate more hits.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not news, really. It\u2019s click bait, the stuff pageviews are made of. There\u2019s no parochialism, no xenophobia, no mock outrage, and almost no politics\u2014nothing that could limit the potential audience for these pieces, which is, in short, the entire English-speaking online world.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Mail\u2019s online publisher, Marin Clarke, attributes the site\u2019s rise to just publishing the news \u201cthat people want to read.\u201d<\/a><\/em> But the vision of a scrubbed and inoffensive Mail posited by Oremus isn\u2019t quite true. The site has no trouble whatsoever taking regular aim at modern Pagans on their website, often distorting facts and writing lurid headlines to generate outrage (which generates hits). Some example headlines involving Pagans include: \u201cPagans are on the march \u2013 but are they harmless eccentrics or a dangerous cult?,\u201d\u00a0\u201cGod save us from the crazy religious privileges in jails that cost the taxpayer millions,\u201d \u201cHow to cure a witch: Catholic Church issues guide in Britain to turn the tables on Harry Potter,\u201d and \u201cPagan prisoners given time off to worship the Sun God.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
Typical Daily Mail headline about Pagans.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

The Mail\u2019s lurid sensationalism in regard to Paganism is longstanding, and often I found myself responding to, and correcting, their shoddy \u201creporting\u201d. There was the\u00a0\u201cBritish schools teach Paganism\u201d<\/a> distortion, the\u00a0\u201cBBC is too Pagan friendly\u201d<\/a> pile-on, the\u00a0\u201cmuseums are changing their policies because they are afraid of Pagans\u201d<\/a> exaggeration, and\u00a0the scathing anti-Pagan vitriol from Melanie Phillips<\/a> when\u00a0The Druid Network won charity status<\/a>. It\u00a0\u00a0reached a point where I simply had enough<\/a>, vowing to never link them again, and urging others to do the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that\u2019s it.\u00a0To quote a famous Bond villian:<\/a> Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it\u2019s enemy action. Five times in the span of three months? It\u2019s a paranoid unhealthy obsession. They can\u2019t seem to actually write something fair-minded about our faiths, as if the mention of Paganism, Druidry, or Wicca sparks some sort of Pavlovian urge to cast themselves as\u00a0Sgt. Howie in The Wicker Man<\/a> (sans the ending, of course). They are an unwitting parody of conservative thinking, a reactionary journalistic Chicken Little constantly warning of the sky falling, knowing that eventually something they scream about will be correct.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d call for a boycott, or angry letters, but that just feeds the beast. They thrive, crave, our attention. The outrage-baiting headlines, the choppy barely-rewritten-from-the-newswires prose interspersed with distortions and clumsily obscured personal opinion, it\u2019s all an attention-generating machine. So it stops here. No more links. No more attention. Let\u2019s stop pretending they are \u201cnews\u201d, and deny them the page-views they so\u00a0desperately desire. Don\u2019t forward them, respond to them, Tweet them, or share them on Facebook. If you must comment on a story they do, find the kernel of a real story and report on that. Dig deeper. Don\u2019t provide them with any more fuel. They are a parody of the news, but that joke isn\u2019t funny anymore.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the most part, I\u2019ve kept my promise to not link them. Though exhortations to my fellow Pagans haven\u2019t really taken hold, and their articles are often forwarded through social media sites, and linked to on Pagan blogs. I can\u2019t really blame them, the Mail Online works very hard to\u00a0titillate\u00a0or infuriate, making it hard to not engage.<\/p>\n

The point, however, is not to simply renew my call for Pagans to deny the Mail linking oxygen, but to ask a larger question. If the Mail Online is now the most popular Internet paper in the world, how does that affect how people see modern Paganism? I posit that it reinforces the opinion that Pagans are strange outsiders who make unreasonable demands on government, undermine society, aren\u2019t to be taken seriously, and are a symptom of societal collapse. Even when they aren\u2019t openly villainizing Pagans, and simply rewriting reporting from other papers<\/a>, it\u2019s balanced out with stories about \u201cblack magic rituals\u201d forcing the closure of woodland caves. In short, Pagans are only paid attention to when its a controversy. \u00a0To the Mail, we are either \u201charmless eccentrics\u201d<\/em> or a \u201cdangerous cult,\u201d<\/em> there\u2019s no in between.<\/p>\n

When we interact with, and create, media, Pagans need to be more savvy than ever before. We have to think about how a story will play out in all kinds of outlets, and what the ramifications of our every word will be. We can\u2019t control the hits-hungry amoral ethic of the Mail, but we can refuse to participate in their business model, deny them pull-quotes for their sensationalism, and work instead with outlets that have built a track record of responsible reporting. Better still, we can continue to work on lifting up our own media, so that there are strong advocates for Pagan voices on the Internet.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

British tabloid The Daily Mail\u2019s website has become the most-visited newspaper site in the world, surpassing The New York Times (though the Times disputes those numbers). Analyzing the rise of the Mail Online, Will Oremus at Slate.com notes that the site drifts away from the xenophobic nativism of its print version to focus on anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[1206,3640,2352],"class_list":["post-9100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paganism","category-religion","tag-journalism","tag-paganism","tag-the-daily-mail"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Does The Daily Mail's Internet Success Mean for Pagans?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"British tabloid The Daily Mail's website has become the most-visited newspaper site in the world, surpassing The New York Times (though the Times disputes\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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