How the Daily Mail online hides adverse reader comments about its stories: a case study
Zara Phillips is fit. You can probably take that in both senses of the word, but principallly she’s an Olympic horsewoman, and you don’t get to be an Olympic pretty much anything without being exceedingly good at it — and strong, and, well, fit. Riding a lot tightens muscles you might not know you had, including around the stomach. A friend who’s been riding three times a week has lost a ton of weight, and was hardly lardy to begin with.
So what is the Daily Mail’s story of September 14? “Zara Phillips shows off her fuller figure as she prepares to defend European title“.
Usually impeccably dressed in a fitted riding costume, Zara looked out of sorts in a white vest and ill-fitting cargo-style shorts which hinted at a fuller figure than usual for the world champion sportswoman.
Uh-huh. A top rider doesn’t look like a catwalk model in between events? Perish the thought. Lordy, she’s fallen afoul of the Daily Mail Rule: she is female and she is not skinny-but-not-too-skinny. (Because if she was too thin, the Mail would be saying “Friends fear for too-thin Kate”. What do you mean, which friends? Any snapper is proud to call himself a “friend”. If he’s said “Alright Zara?” and she hasn’t actually spat in his face, he’s a “friend” for the purposes of stories like this.
(Though you have to be pasting the link - as I was - to see it, the images are labelled “BigZara”. Mm-hmm. I was going to pull in from the Mail site but thought there might be a row about copyright, which would be distracting.)
Let’s leave alone for a moment though how absurd this story is. What do the readers of the site think? There are tons of comments on this story. The Mail has a system whereby it shows you a couple of comments, and if you want to see the lot then you have to click on a little button.
So what comments are visible before you click the button? At the time of writing, they are:
She looks gorgeous and, most importantly, healthy. - Amberdallas, Waco, TX, USA
Looks like muscle and womanly curves from here.- Marcie, Tallahassee, Florida
Normal… and lovely! - Sue Timbers, Baldock, England
OK? Nice and calm. Now click on the full comments - 36, as I write.
The first three:
• I am so fed up of everyone complaining of how many thin women there are in papers and mag and then as soon as you get someone who has a NORMAL figure in one all the writers describe her as ‘fuller figured’ or having a ‘paunch’ or of putting on the pounds. Hounestly you either like people thin or normal, make up your minds! - Laura, London
• I find it hard to understand just how we women are supposed to look. Keira Knightley is very slim and there are countless articles criticising her for being “skeletal”. Zara, who is a champion horsewoman, is of average size (something I’d think ought to be recommended for a sportswoman) and is described as “fuller figured”, which is apparently a bad thing. Is there a certain weight bracket that we all ought to fit into? - Lorrie, Manchester
• The term “fuller figure” implies she is fat, which she most certainly is not! That’s muscle and she looks healthy and normal. Not at all like the “starving refugee look” so in style among the VIPs of the media world. Good for you Zara! - Morgan Le Fay, Alabama, USA
And it continues in that vein. The lesson one takes away: the Mail’s online readers - which it’s chasing with a determined drive - do not like these stories. They perceive the hypocrisy inherent in them and they’re calling the Mail’s bluff, extremely loudly.
The interesting questions that remain:
- will this feed back into the print edition and the decisions they make about the stories they run?
- who chooses the comments that get displayed (because there must be some decision about it - that’s no accident that the most emollient are the ones shown
- is there any chance that those first two people from the US really exist?
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- My assertion: Daily Mail uses fake commenters on (at least one of) its stories. My evidence: below (16 September 2007; score: 86.1%)
- Journalism or "churnalism"? Nick Davies of the Gdn weighs in.. (31 January 2008; score: 82.14%)
- To whom this email may not concern (14 July 2004; score: 70.65%)
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September 16th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
In fairness to the Mail, they always display the most recent three comments on the story itself, so if you had visited the story when there were only three vitriolic comments against the story, that is what you would have seen. As to whether after a while they tend to always make the last three comments published positive and in chime with their editorial view, that I couldn’t say.
September 16th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
@Martin - “they always display the most recent three comments on the story itself”. That isn’t true. There’s no timestamp on the comments, but I looked at this with my wife over the course of a couple of days, when it went from a few comments to many. The same three mild comments were displayed; but the more vitriolic (all aimed at the Mail) appeared later.
So the Mail doesn’t show the “three most recent”. It might make it look that way, but that’s not the case.
See the next post for details about the reality, or otherwise, of those favourable commenters.
September 16th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
[…] my previous post, I noted how the Daily Mail’s site hides comments that are unfavourable to one of its […]
September 16th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
>> It might make it look that way, but that’s not the case.
As an unlikely defender of the Daily Mail, I do believe you are mistaken here.
I can’t see any stories on the Mail’s front page at the moment where the three comments initially shown at the bottom of the story are not the same as the last three comments shown on the fully expanded set of comments, albeit in reversed order.
On the article you are writing about as I look at the page the three favourable comments shown on the article are from Amberdallas, Marcie and Sue Timbers. If you expand it, the bottom three comments are the same, from Sue Timbers, Marcie and Amberdallas in that order.
As I say, the initial page seems to show the most recent three comments added to a story, with the most recent first. The expanded view shows the comments in the order they were published, with those three at the bottom.
I’m not saying that the Mail doesn’t cherry-pick which comments to publish - after all they’ve previously edited my comments on their site in order to change their meaning - http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2007/02/now_the_daily_mail_is_twisting.php
However, I can’t see any evidence at all that the three comments are a story-by-story editorial selection from the whole set of comments published under that story
September 17th, 2007 at 7:55 am
@Martin again: sorry, but you miss the point. The comments *have no timestamp*. So you don’t know which are “most recent”. It would be very easy to have a CMS that would show “chosen” comments, and put those at the end.
The test, as I say, is to follow a story over a couple of days. Looking at it once does not give the picture.
And your example is a very neat encapsulation of the fact that comments are edited. Thanks. Now, try watching a similar story over one, two, three days and see which comments are added first, and which appear before you choose “View All”.
September 17th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Yes, of course. And even if they did have timestamps, if you are inclined to believe their is manipulation at work, then you could accuse those of being faked too, as the Biased BBC blog often does of BBC News online stories.
To be honest I’d be inclined to invoke Occan’s razor here.
Yes, the Mail *could* have an editorial team carefully cherry-picking comments, re-ordering them on demand, and submitting fake comments from the names of people that can’t be Googled. Or it could have a bunch of harassed over-worked outsourced comment moderators who publish about 30 out of the pile of hundreds of comments they must get on every story, and then they move on to the next one. For a ruthlessly commercial organisation, I don’t see where the ROI is on the former scenario.
September 17th, 2007 at 10:55 am
@Martin: I’d be inclined to believe timestamps, because it’s a complete pain to edit those by hand.
As to Occam’s Razor and where the ROI is: the Mail is investing millions in getting more readers to its site. If the comments that they see when they browse a story (not clicking “view all”) say “this is a load of crap, you need to work out if you like women skinny or normal”, they’ll begin to wonder about the paper, don’t you think? They might experience a bit of cognitive dissonance. Not at all Mailthink.
So there is a benefit to the Mail in creating favourable comments; and, as you say, in cherry-picking (which a number of people have experienced). Whether the former happens - well, if you’ve got people combing through hundreds of comments, would it be quicker just to put them in the hopper and create a couple of favourable ones using plausible-sounding names? (Asking questions is not libel, as any Mail headline writer can tell you.)
My next post - http://www.charlesarthur.com/blog/?p=930 - goes into this for that story. I can find people who gave names who were uncomplimentary (apart from a couple); I draw a complete blank, even using a fair bit of Google-fu, on the complimentary ones. What does Occam’s Razor suggest there, eh?
September 17th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Well, you can at least add to your argument that today I tried to point out on the Mail’s site that despite writing an article about how wrong it was to make a 12/13 year old girl be a model in Australia, they didn’t mind also publishing the pictures of her in a skimpy bikini to illustrate the story. Not surprisingly, they didn’t publish it.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
[…] How the Daily Mail online hides adverse reader comments about its stories: a case study The lesson one takes away: the Mail’s online readers - which it’s chasing with a determined drive - do not like these stories. They perceive the hypocrisy inherent in them and they’re calling the Mail’s bluff, extremely loudly. (tags: newspaper+websites daily+mail comments moderation) […]