Daily Mail - Famous Stories

Famous Stories

On 7 January 1967, the Mail published a story, "The holes in our roads", about potholes, giving the examples of Blackburn where it said there were 4,000 holes. This detail was then immortalised by John Lennon in The Beatles song "A Day in the Life", along with an account of the death of 21-year-old socialite Tara Browne in a car crash on 18 December 1966, which also appeared in the same issue.

In 1981, the Daily Mail ran an investigation into the Unification Church, nicknamed the Moonies, and branded them "the church that breaks up families" in the article, which accused them of brainwashing converts. The Unification Church, which always denied brainwashing, sued for libel and lost heavily. A jury awarded the Mail a record-breaking £750,000—then the biggest libel payout. In 1983 the paper won a special British Press Award for a "relentless campaign against the malignant practices of the Unification Church."

On 16 July 1993 the Mail ran the headline "Abortion hope after 'gay genes' finding"; this headline has been widely criticised in subsequent years, for example as "perhaps the most infamous and disturbing headline of all" (of headlines from tabloid newspapers commenting on the Xq28 gene).

The Mail campaigned on the case of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager who was murdered in a racially motivated attack in Eltham, London in April 1993. On 14 February 1997, the Mail led its front page with a picture of the five men accused of Lawrence's murder and the headline "MURDERERS", stating that it believed that the men had murdered Lawrence and adding "if we are wrong, let them sue us". This attracted praise from Paul Foot and Peter Preston. However, other journalists have criticised the Mail′s coverage, contending that it was very late to change its stance on the reporting surrounding Lawrence's murder, with the newspaper's earlier focus being the alleged opportunistic behaviour of anti-racist groups ("How Race Militants Hijacked a Trajedy", 10 May 1993) with very little coverage of the case (20 articles in three years).

On 9 October 2009, the Mail ran the headline "Hunger striker's £7m Big Mac: Tamil who cost London a fortune in policing was sneaking in fast-food". The article stated that "Scotland Yard surveillance teams using specialist monitoring equipment had watched in disbelief" as Parameswaran Subramaniyan, a Tamil hunger striker protesting outside the Houses of Parliament, covertly broke his fast by secretly eating McDonald's burgers. When a request for an apology and retraction of this story was refused, Mr Subramanyam issued proceedings against the paper. In court, the newspaper's claim was shown to be entirely false; the Met superintendent in charge of the policing operation confirmed there had been no police surveillance team using the "specialist monitoring equipment". As a result, on 29 July 2010, Mr Subramanyam is understood to have accepted damages of £47,500 from the Daily Mail. The newspaper also paid his legal costs, withdrew the allegations and apologised "sincerely and unreservedly" for the distress that had been caused.

A 16 October 2009 Jan Moir article on the death of Stephen Gately, which many people felt was inaccurate, insensitive, and homophobic, generated over 25,000 complaints, the highest number of complaints for a newspaper article in the history of the Press Complaints Commission. Major advertisers such as Marks and Spencer responded to the criticism by asking for their own adverts to be removed from the Mail Online webpage around Moir's article. The Daily Mail removed all display ads from the webpage with the Gately column.

On 13 June 2011, a study by Dr Matt Jones and Michal Kucewicz on the effects of cannabinoid receptor activation in the brain was published in the Journal of Neuroscience and the British medical journal The Lancet. The study was used in articles by CBS News, Le Figaro, Bild and others. In October 2011, the Daily Mail printed an article citing the research, titled "Just ONE cannabis joint can bring on schizophrenia as well as damaging memory." UK political party Cannabis Law Reform (CLEAR), which campaigns for ending drug prohibition, criticised the Daily Mail, and contacted Dr Matt Jones, author of the study, who said he was "disappointed but not surprised" at the Daily Mail′s reporting, and clarified: "This study does NOT say that one spliff will bring on schizophrenia". Dorothy Bishop, professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, in her blog awarded the Daily Mail the "Orwellian Prize for Journalistic Misrepresentation", calling the Daily Mail's article "the worst misrepresentation of a scientific article in a national newspaper." The Daily Mail was the sole nominee for the award, with Bishop commenting: "I'm pleased not to have had more nominations this year: it suggests that, despite all the grumblings about science journalism, the field is in rude health." The Mail later changed the article's headline to: "Just ONE cannabis joint 'can cause psychiatric episodes similar to schizophrenia' as well as damaging memory."

On 3 April 2012, the freelance journalist Samantha Brick wrote an article on the Daily Mail website titled "There are downsides to looking this pretty': Why women hate me for being beautiful". The article went viral on social media websites and Brick trended globally on Twitter.