Mark Pack

It’s a fair question to ask: lots of complaints made over Jan Moir’s piece on the death of Stephen Gately, none upheld.

However, as Enemies of Reason points out, that isn’t the only measure of success:

But I would like to hope – hope against hope – that the storm the Daily Mail found itself in after Moir’s ill-judged and venomous article made them, in some small way, feel they were a little more vulnerable to the outside world, and their own readers, than they were before. It’s easy to dismiss the rantings of a few pointless troublemakers like me, for example, but when it’s several thousand people, and several thousand readers, that’s a different matter.

It’s worth pointing out here that the immediate swipes at Stephen Gately just hours after he had died were not a one-off. The Mail had previously delighted in the disappearance of TV presenter Mark Speight, gleefully poring over his personal life and allowing reader comments to insult him while he was missing and, as it turned out, suicidal. Missing chef Claudia Lawrence has had her personal life intruded into, also, supposedly in the public interest – though I fail to see how. The message has always been ‘Don’t let the corpse get cold’, although it’s also important to say that the Mail are by no means the only offender when it comes to this kind of behaviour.

Today, after the death of Kristian Digby, the Mail’s article is calm and respectful.

Things didn’t quite stay that way, but go and read the post and comments for the full story.