The Daily Mail - coverage of the Polish people

Hi.I don't want to get you bored. Probably you have spoken about this problem many,many times. I have started this topic as I want to find out about your opinion concerning the Polish coverage by the Daily Mail now.In August 2008 the Federation of Poles in Great Britain made complain about 50 Daily Mail’s headlines to PCC. Do you think that something has changed since then?

Not really. The Daily Fail will always seek to distort and sensationalise events to pander to their readers sense of outrage about most things.It's just a trashy newspaper with a right wing agenda that is trying to bolster it's falling sales by lurid headlines. If it's not the Polish it would be the Albanians or Muslims or one legged Nepalese Sherpas stealing 'our' job, 'our' women etc. etc.

So... the question is how much The Daily Mail changed British attitude toward Polish people?

There are a load of these tabloids, Daily Star, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Sport, The Sun, The Morning Star, the Metro, News of the World etc...

Quantifying how much of an effect they have on the attitudes of the readers would be difficult.

When I lived in Britain in 1981 staying with British friends with no Polish connections, I once bought The Daily Mail and brought it home. " 'The Daily Mail' is not allowed here" (that is, at their home) - they told me.

The sort of people who read the Daily wail and other such comics are probably the sort of people who dont like Poles or anyone else anyway , so i doubt it will make that much difference to how the Brits view the Poilsh people there...

Some will love em , some will hate em...and most won,t care one way or the other...

I now only ever glance at the headlines of the DM without venturing further as past experience has shown it is a paper which simply focuses on negative portrayals of people: politicians who don't toe the Tory line; workers who have the temerity to stand up for their rights by, for example, taking industrial action; ethnic minorities, which they portray as a threat to 'the British way of life'; sections of society such as single mothers and gays which are easy targets; but there are many more who suffer the wrath of this feeble-minded paper which does nothing to open people's minds but does everything to hang onto a readership which simply looks to have its own existing fears and prejudices confirmed.

To be honest, even if the DM toned down its coverage of Polish people in Britain it would make little difference as the same one-view attitude would still prevail amongst its readers. It's a paper best treated as the joke it is; it has no influence and worse still it has lousy sports coverage. I'd say if the DM is anti something dear to you then it should probably be taken as a compliment.

Metro, December 2006



Daily Mail, 17 January 2008

'Have you tried speaking with a Polish accent?'
Metro, December 2007



The Daily Telegraph, 2007

I thought the swan eating thing was a joke..! Did they actually print that rubbish....?

Has there actually been any case of a Pole or any Eastern European eating a swan , or is it as i suspect total guff...?

Calls for clampdown on river bandits from eastern Europe[
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-473578/Sorry-poached-swans-Calls-clampdown-river-bandits-eastern-Europe.html


Read the comments under the main article in the above link.

Poles in Poland . even the poor ones don,t eat swans....why would they do it in the UK...?

Have they been accused of kidnapping and eating children yet...?

Do you remember my post "Angry swan eater?". Lol

And now for facts (this is special kind; "Daily Mail fact"):
Two informations were published:
1) Somebody's uncle went to a pub, and met a guy, who told him, that he heard the story that two eastern Europeans (Polish and Lithuanian) were seen carrying a swan.

2) Dead swan was found on the shore of the lake somewhere in the country. As it is virtually impossible that a swan could die from illness, old age or hunted by fox - it's obvious that the devil eastern europeans killed it.

Now do some math. Ad point one to the point two - and the conclusion is simple: Swan is a Polish traditional dish! Elementary, dear Watson.

I think the point is that it is sensationalist right-wing rubbish that fuels prejudice.
On building sites this is the main form of reading and I was shocked at what was written on "The Metro", the free underground tabloid, pure and utter rubbish.

But there are good newspapers and I think most Brits know about the agenda of these rag mags.

Oh yes, swans with butter are simply delicious!

How disgusting... imagine actually catching a fish with a hook, ripping it's top lip apart and... eating the fish! My god, don't these Polish savages realise that fish don't come from the river, they come from the frozen section of Tesco?

And how dare they steal swans... there'll be none left for the anglers to poison with their lead weights.

I was once called by the Daily Mail, they wanted me to work on a story for them. The work consisted of taking a Polish registered car to England and then getting lots of parking and speeding tickets so they could write a story about the disgrace that Poles can park where they want and speed when they want. I pointed out that they were offering to pay somebody to commit a crime and doing that is in itself a crime. They replied that I obviously wasn't the person that they were looking for. I then forwarded the emails to a mate of mine who got in touch with them, got them to email him the same offer and then sold the story to Private Eye.

Nice one!

That would be a good story! Unfortunately not the true one - the owner of this car would be tracked and punished. That is how EU works, I am afraid.

It would just depend on how much effort the police made to track the owner (probably the newspaper itself) down. Sadly, the police are too overloaded with other things to probably be able to bother (at least, that's what the paper might be thinking).

No they would not. They couldn't be for the parking tickets because in almost all of the UK parking tickets are an administrative punishment and not a criminal offense. And they wouldn't be for the speeding tickets because the standard practice for speed cameras in the UK is to throw away all photos of foreign registered cars.

However, the story about the Daily Mail trying to prove that Poles come to England and break the law by, er, paying a Pole to come to England and break the law was a superb story!

I am not sure how the system works in the UK, but in Poland every registration number is ascribed to the owner of the car. There is also a database. In order to get a name, address and personal identification number of any car owner - the Police shall make one phone call to the Polish Consulate. Not very time consuming, IMHO.

In theory, no. However, think about the irish Mr Prawo Jazdy story. How long did it take the irish police to realise the mistake there?

It part of the same group (DM and Metro are one in the same) - the main news stories in any of papers are taken of Reuters (for both papers)


The misconception that DM readers are uneducated isnt quite true, the demographics are as follows:

middle class
high earning professionals
retired middle class

(ABC1 - readers to be exact)

I dont think we can just blame the DM for the bad press immigrants get, most papers have had a go about the high numbers.

No I dont read it, I just know a bit about the DM and advertising...which is mainly where the news papers get their revenue from these days, not Joe Public paying 70p or whatever it is - so evidently some of the large companies who advertise in the DM dont mind its content.


I bet they read the Guardian?


I would imagine very little - since most that read it are not affected by Poles living in the UK..i.e. low income, non professional.

yeah, that's why the (identical) stories have been on Yahoo for about 2-3 days before they arrive in the metro.

Well... I don't belive in this story.

This is polish Driving Licence (prawo jazdy):
A Quiz : Where is a name and surname?

Why do you need a paper when you have eyes and a mouth?

You are somewhere near the truth. In fact, my friends read no newspapers, had no TV set at home, but as very well educated people indeed, they used to listen to BBC 4 for information and entertainment (the "Weekending" programme, for example, which I adored as well and learned English through it). But if British Parliament had passed a law obliging every household in the UK to buy at least one newspaper a day, I'm sure that my friends - Labour supporters born in Manchester - would have surely turned to the "Manchester Guardian" ...

By the way, I still remember a story in The Daily Mail of 1981 in which they were describing a pub owner, dedicated Conservative supporter, cutting out a full-size silhouette of Mrs. Thatcher, the then British PM, and sticking it on the door of the ladies' loo in his pub with a pair of orange pants, his wive's old ones - as he explained, down the silhouette's legs. Then three Tory ladies came in for a drink, saw Mrs T. hanging on the door of the loo with her pants down, were so outraged that they demanded removal of the Iron Lady from the door, but first of all, removal of the pants. The owner had firmly refused this demand and asked the ladies out, so the orange pants had luckily stayed up - or rather down! - until The Daily Mail reporter arrived to make a photo of it. His customers - fervent Conservative supporters - found it extremely funny, he said. The mother of my other friend, a Labour supporter, found it extremely disgusting, however, when she saw that picture in the paper I brought along to her house. I did not hear Mrs T. making any comment on this incident later on.

Agreed (but these were the garda, after all). However, my UK/EU licence has DRIVING LICENCE above the UK sign. It has nothing else on that line. Then it has my names below. The Rzeczpospolita Polska writing has no equivalent on my licence (don't know what Irish ones look like, but there is no other writing saying "United Kingdom", just the EU flag.). And if you don't speak Polish, that might mean "Polish Driving Licence".

Also my licence has no "permis de conduire". Going by the lines, "prwo jazdy" is about where my names would be.

Possible to make a mistake like that.

On the top: Polish pre-2004 Driving Licence.
On the bottom: The current one.

polskie prawo jazdy

Here is the British one:

driving licence

Slightly different, but pretty much standarised.
Point 1) Surname
Point 2) Given name

Really - I find it hard to believe that Irish cops could be so stupid.

The swan thing originated with a Sun article. Some people were camping out in tents near London and there were a pile of swans' wings outside. They refused to come out of the tent to speak to the reporter but said they were Polish. If I remember, the article said there was a copy of the bible in Romanian on a table by the tent flap.

The thing about fishing for carp and other river fish to actually eat (yuk) is however true.