Oh dear oh dear oh dear. The Daily Mail just won’t give up, will they? Not satisfied with being subtly homophobic, xenophobic, racist, scaremongering morons, the folks at the UK’s least favorite newspaper are still waving the flag of misinformation when it comes to the likes of games. Or maybe they just like scaring everyone more than usual.

Recently, a report was released related to the happiness of the UK’s children and cited factors such as overworked parents as why kids are so unhappy as of late. The Daily Mail though? They chose the least-important, least-damaging thing the report could mention; they went for videogames…

COMPUTERS AND TV BLAMED FOR TEENAGE VIOLENCE AND CASUAL SEX, screamed the headline in the newspaper (and over on the Mail’s website). Of course, the second paragraph blamed a bunch of other things, but they wouldn’t have made so many readers scream, wail, and hide their daughters in cupboards for fear of attack by a foreign immigrant homosexual, or whatever it is the readers are scared of today. Apart from games, obviously.

[The report] blamed computer games, the internet and television for ‘the lurch to more and more violence which we know can breed violence and increase mental illness’.

In essence, the quote up there reads “games cause violence, which causes violence.” It’s like the report couldn’t make up its mind…trust the Mail to use the most defunct phrase from the report to attack something that’s really done nothing wrong.

However, I’m not really here to moan about the Mail’s twenty-thousandth ill-informed report on games. What gets me here is the terribly obvious irony of their article and the fact that, in complete awareness of this irony, it was published anyway as if we’d all be completely oblivious to it; like we’d just nod, agree, and burn our PlayStations. Here’s that second paragraph I mentioned earlier…

[The report] cited celebrity culture, advertising and peer pressure among the reasons why girls often have sex as soon as they reach the age of consent.

The Daily Mail’s readership is mostly female. The website – and the newspaper itself – is littered with advertisements: three alone, in plain view, when you first open the site. Down the right-hand side of the page, there are links to articles about Scarlet Johansson, Britney Spears, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Christian Bale. The front page of the newspaper every single day, without fail, will feature a picture of an overly-hyped celebrity beside the upper-case scaremongering headline of the day.

I’m not criticizing advertising (after all, plenty of websites and publications rely on it) and while I think the celebrity culture is ridiculous I’m not here to lament that either. What gets my goat is The Daily Mail’s desperation to put out as overly-scandalized a news story as they can in order to terrify their readership of 2 million into buying the paper every day, as if expecting some sort of salvation.

Making games look like the apocalypse is one thing. Ignoring your own flaws – as a professional publication, read by millions – in order to sell papers is another. Seriously, why hasn’t this stupid newspaper been run into the ground, or at least told to grow a frickin’ brain? GRRAAAGH.

RAGRHRHAG SCARY HEADLINE – Mail Online

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