Daily Mail does “God”

Sept 25, 2011 – Today’s Mail on Sunday announces ‘£5 OFF AT TESCO’ – a fitting headline for this Holy Christian day of worship.

There’s also a story about how the ‘BBC TURNS ITS BACK ON YEAR OF OUR LORD’. The Mail accuses the BBC of “dropping the terms BC and AD in case they offend non-Christians”.

But the final paragraph of the Mail article contradicts this claim: “The BBC has not issued editorial guidance on the date systems. ‘Both AD and BC, and CE and BCE are widely accepted date systems and the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams’.”

Whatever. More interesting to me is the strange assortment of framing in the Mail piece:

“absurd political correctness”
“change just for the sake of change”
“alien language/Europhile agenda”
“sidelining Christianity”
“dumbing down of the Christian basis of our culture”
“BBC trying to undermine Christianity by pushing an aggressive secularism”

Some of this framing is taken directly from “Several prominent Christians” (eg “The Rev Peter Mullen, Anglican chaplain to the London Stock Exchange”). The Mail also helpfully points out that the website for BBC Religion and Ethics is “headed by commissioning editor Aaqil Ahmed, who is a Muslim…”.

It’s a bizarre and untypical headline article, but it tells us something about the editorial “position” of the Mail. Something for future reference… And what will the shoppers at Tesco make of it, as they glance at the newspaper stand?

>> See also the blog on this Mail story from Tabloid Watch.