Daily Mail

Overview

The Mail was originally a broadsheet but switched to a compact format on 3 May 1971, the 75th anniversary of its founding. On this date it also absorbed the Daily Sketch, which had been published as a tabloid by the same company.

The publisher of the Mail, the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), is listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Circulation figures according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations in February 2020 show gross daily sales of 1,134,184 for the Daily Mail. According to a December 2004 survey, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats. The main concern of Viscount Rothermere, the current chairman and main shareholder, is that the circulation be maintained. He testified before a House of Lords select committee that "we need to allow editors the freedom to edit", and therefore the newspaper's editor was free to decide editorial policy, including its political allegiance. In November 2021, Ted Verity began a new seven-day role as editor of Mail newspapers, with responsibility for the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and You magazine.

History

Early history

The Daily Mail, devised by Alfred Harmsworth (later Viscount Northcliffe) and his brother Harold (later Viscount Rothermere), was first published on 4 May 1896. It was an immediate success. It cost a halfpenny at a time when other London dailies cost one penny, and was more populist in tone and more concise in its coverage than its rivals. The planned issue was 100,000 copies, but the print run on the first day was 397,215, and additional printing facilities had to be acquired to sustain a circulation that rose to 500,000 in 1899. Lord Salisbury, 19th-century Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, dismissed the Daily Mail as "a newspaper produced by office boys for office boys." By 1902, at the end of the Boer Wars, the circulation was over a million, making it the largest in the world.

With Harold running the business side of the operation and Alfred as editor, the Mail from the start adopted an imperialist political stance, taking a patriotic line in the Second Boer War, leading to claims that it was not reporting the issues of the day objectively. The Mail also set out to entertain its readers with human interest stories, serials, features and competitions. It was the first newspaper to recognise the potential market of the female reader with a women's interest section and hired one of the first female war correspondents Sarah Wilson who reported during the Second Boer War.

In 1900, the Daily Mail began printing simultaneously in both Manchester and London, the first national newspaper to do so (in 1899, the Daily Mail had organised special trains to bring the London-printed papers north). The same production method was adopted in 1909 by the Daily Sketch, in 1927 by the Daily Express and eventually by virtually all the other national newspapers. Printing of the Scottish Daily Mail was switched from Edinburgh to the Deansgate plant in Manchester in 1968 and, for a while, The People was also printed on the Mail presses in Deansgate. In 1987, printing at Deansgate ended, and the northern editions were thereafter printed at other Associated Newspapers plants.

For a time in the early 20th century, the paper championed vigorously against the "Yellow Peril", warning of the alleged dangers said to be posted by Chinese immigration to the United Kingdom. The "Yellow Peril" theme came to be abandoned because the Anglo-German naval race led to a more plausible threat to the British empire to be presented. In common with other Conservative papers, the Daily Mail used the Anglo-German naval race as a way of criticising the Liberal governments that were in power from 1906 onward, claiming that the Liberals were too pusillanimous in their response to the Tirpitz plan.

Inter-war period

Light-hearted stunts enlivened Northcliffe, such as the 'Hat campaign' in the winter of 1920. This was a contest with a prize of £100 for a new design of hat – a subject in which Northcliffe took a particular interest. There were 40,000 entries and the winner was a cross between a top hat and a bowler christened the Daily Mail Sandringham Hat. The paper subsequently promoted the wearing of it but without much success.

In 1919, Alcock and Brown made the first flight across the Atlantic, winning a prize of £10,000 from the Daily Mail. In 1930 the Mail made a great story of another aviation stunt, awarding another prize of £10,000 to Amy Johnson for making the first solo flight from England to Australia.

The Daily Mail had begun the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1908. At first, Northcliffe had disdained this as a publicity stunt to sell advertising and he refused to attend. But his wife exerted pressure upon him and he changed his view, becoming more supportive. By 1922 the editorial side of the paper was fully engaged in promoting the benefits of modern appliances and technology to free its female readers from the drudgery of housework. The Mail maintained the event until selling it to Media 10 in 2009. As Lord Northcliffe aged, his grip on the paper slackened and there were periods when he was not involved. His physical and mental health declined rapidly in 1921, and he died in August 1922 at age 57. His brother Lord Rothermere took full control of the paper.

In the Chanak Crisis of 1922, Britain almost went to war with Turkey. The Prime Minister David Lloyd George, supported by the War Secretary Winston Churchill, were determined to go to war over the Turkish demand that the British leave their occupation zone with Churchill sending out telegrams asking for Canada, Australia and New Zealand to all send troops for the expected war. George Ward Price, the "extra-special correspondent" of The Daily Mail was sympathetic towards the beleaguered British garrison at Chanak, but was also sympathetic towards the Turks. Ward Price wrote in his articles that Mustafa Kemal did not have wider ambitions to restore the lost frontiers of the Ottoman Empire and only wanted the Allies to leave Asia Minor. The Daily Mail ran a huge banner headline on 21 September 1922 that stated "Get Out Of Chanak!" In a leader (editorial), the Daily Mail wrote that the views of Churchill, who very much favoured going to war with Turkey, were "bordering on insanity". The same leader noted that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada had rejected Churchill's request for troops, which led the leader to warn that Churchill's efforts to call upon the Dominions for help for the expected war were endangering the unity of the British empire.

Post-war history

On 5 May 1946, the Daily Mail celebrated its Golden Jubilee. Winston Churchill was the chief guest at the banquet and toasted it with a speech. Newsprint rationing in the Second World War had forced the Daily Mail to cut its size to four pages, but the size gradually increased through the 1950s. In 1947, when the Raj ended, the Daily Mail featured a banner headline reading "India: 11 words mark the end of an empire". During the Suez crisis of 1956, the Daily Mail consistently took a hardline against President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, taking the viewpoint that Britain was justified in invading Egypt to retake control of the Suez canal and topple Nasser.

The Daily Mail was transformed by its editor during the 1970s and 1980s, David English. He had been editor of the Daily Sketch from 1969 to 1971, when it closed. Part of the same group from 1953, the Sketch was absorbed by its sister title, and English became editor of the Mail, a post in which he remained for more than 20 years. English transformed it from a struggling newspaper selling half as many copies as its mid-market rival, the Daily Express, to a formidable publication, whose circulation rose to surpass that of the Express by the mid-1980s. English was knighted in 1982.

The paper enjoyed a period of journalistic success in the 1980s, employing Fleet Street writers such as gossip columnist Nigel Dempster, Lynda Lee-Potter and sportswriter Ian Wooldridge (who unlike some of his colleagues – the paper generally did not support sporting boycotts of white-minority-ruled South Africa – strongly opposed apartheid). In 1982 a Sunday title, the Mail on Sunday, was launched (the Scottish Sunday Mail, now owned by the Mirror Group, was founded in 1919 by the first Lord Rothermere, but later sold).

Knighted in 1982, Sir David English became editor-in-chief and chairman of Associated Newspapers in 1992 after Rupert Murdoch had attempted to hire Evening Standard editor Paul Dacre as editor of The Times. The Evening Standard was then part of the Associated Newspapers group, and Dacre was appointed to succeed English at the Daily Mail as a means of dealing with Murdoch's offer. Dacre retired as editor of the Daily Mail but remains editor-in-chief of the group.

In late 2013, the paper moved its London printing operation from the city's Docklands area to a new £50 million plant in Thurrock, Essex. There are Scottish editions of both the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, with different articles and columnists.

Scottish, Irish, Continental, and Indian editions

Scottish Daily Mail

The Scottish Daily Mail was published as a separate title from Edinburgh starting in December 1946. The circulation was poor though, falling to below 100,000 and the operation was rebased to Manchester in December 1968. The Scottish Daily Mail was relaunched in 1995; it is printed in Glasgow. It had an average circulation of 67,900 in the area of Scotland in December 2019.

Irish Daily Mail

The Daily Mail officially entered the Irish market with the launch of a local version of the paper on 6 February 2006; free copies of the paper were distributed on that day in some locations to publicise the launch. Its masthead differed from that of UK versions by having a green rectangle with the word "IRISH", instead of the Royal Arms, but this was later changed, with "Irish Daily Mail" displayed instead. The Irish version includes stories of Irish interest alongside content from the UK version. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Irish edition had a circulation of 63,511 for July 2007, falling to an average of 49,090 for the second half of 2009. Since 24 September 2006 Ireland on Sunday, the Irish Sunday newspaper acquired by Associated in 2001, was replaced by an Irish edition of the Mail on Sunday (the Irish Mail on Sunday), to tie in with the weekday newspaper.

Continental and Overseas Daily Mail

Two foreign editions were begun in 1904 and 1905; the former titled the Overseas Daily Mail, covering the world, and the latter titled the Continental Daily Mail, covering Europe and North Africa.

Mail Today

The newspaper entered India on 16 November 2007 with the launch of Mail Today, a 48-page compact size newspaper printed in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida with a print run of 110,000 copies. Based around a subscription model, the newspaper has the same fonts and feel as the Daily Mail and was set up with investment from Associated Newspapers and editorial assistance from the Daily Mail newsroom. The paper alternated between supporting the Congress-led UPA regime as well as the BJP-led NDA regime. Between 2010 and 2014, it supported the Kapil Sibal–led reforms to change the undergraduate structure at the University of Delhi. In 2016, it was the first newspaper to break the controversial story about terror slogans being raised in favour of the hanged terrorist Afzal Guru on his death anniversary at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Editorial stance

As a right-wing tabloid, the Mail is traditionally a supporter of the Conservative Party. It has endorsed the party in every UK general election since 1945, with the one exception of the October 1974 UK general election, where it endorsed a Liberal and Conservative coalition. While the paper retained its support for the Conservative Party at the 2015 general election, the paper urged conservatively inclined voters to support UKIP in the constituencies of Heywood and Middleton, Dudley North, and Great Grimsby where UKIP was the main challenger to the Labour Party.

On international affairs, regarding the 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia, the Mail said that Russia had "behaved with shocking arrogance and brutality", but accused the British government of dragging Britain into an unnecessary confrontation with Russia and of hypocrisy regarding its protests over Russian recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's independence, citing the British government's own recognition of Kosovo's independence from Russia's ally Serbia.

The Mail published an article by Joanna Blythman in 2012 opposing the growing of genetically modified crops in the United Kingdom.

The Daily Mail endorsed voting to leave in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.

Awards

The Daily Mail has been awarded the National Newspaper of the Year in 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2011, 2016 and 2019 by the British Press Awards.

Daily Mail journalists have won a range of British Press Awards, including:

"Campaign of the Year" (Murder of Stephen Lawrence, 2012)

"Website of the Year" (Mail Online, 2012)

"News Team of the Year" (Daily Mail, 2012)

"Critic of the Year" (Quentin Letts, 2010)

"Political Journalist of the Year" (Quentin Letts, 2009)

"Specialist Journalist of the Year" (Stephen Wright, 2009)

"Showbiz Reporter of the Year" (Benn Todd, 2012)

"Feature Writer of the Year – Popular" (David Jones, 2012)

"Columnist of the Year – Popular" (Craig Brown, 2012) (Peter Oborne, 2016)

"Best of Humour" – (Craig Brown, 2012)

"Columnist – Popular" (Craig Brown, 2012)

"Sports Reporter of the Year" (Jeff Powell, 2005)

"Sports Photographer of the Year" (Mike Egerton, 2012; Andy Hooper, 2008, 2010, 2016)

"Cartoonist of the Year" (Stanley 'MAC' McMurtry, 2016)

Noted reporting

Suffragette

The term "suffragette" was first used in 1906, as a term of derision by the journalist Charles E. Hands in the Mail to describe activists in the movement for women's suffrage, in particular members of the WSPU. However, the women he intended to ridicule embraced the term, saying "suffraGETtes" (hardening the 'g'), implying not only that they wanted the vote, but that they intended to 'get' it.

Zinoviev Letter

In 1924, the Daily Mail published a letter before the elections in Britain. the letter was purportedly written by Grigory Zinoviev to call for Bolshevik-like revolution in UK. The letter's authenticity has since been questioned.

Holes in the road

On 17 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.

Unification Church

In 1981, the Daily Mail ran an investigation into the Unification Church, nicknamed the Moonies, accusing them of ending marriages and brainwashing converts. The Unification Church, which always denied these claims, sued for libel but lost heavily. A jury awarded the Mail a then record-breaking £750,000 libel payout (equivalent to £2,891,322 in 2025). In 1983 the paper won a special British Press Award for a "relentless campaign against the malignant practices of the Unification Church."

Gay gene controversy

On 16 July 1993, the Mail ran the headline "Abortion hope after 'gay genes' finding". Of the tabloid headlines which commented on the Xq28 gene, the Mail's was criticised as "perhaps the most infamous and disturbing headline of all".

Stephen Lawrence

The Mail campaigned vigorously for justice over the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. On 14 February 1997, the Mail front page pictured the five men accused of Lawrence's murder with the headline "MURDERERS", stating "if we are wrong, let them sue us". This attracted praise from Paul Foot and Peter Preston. Some journalists contended the Mail had belatedly changed its stance on the Lawrence murder, with the newspaper's earlier focus being the alleged opportunistic behaviour of anti-racist groups ("How Race Militants Hijacked a Tragedy", 10 May 1993) and alleged insufficient coverage of the case (20 articles in three years).

Two men who the Mail had featured in their "Murderers" headline were found guilty in 2012 of murdering Lawrence. After the verdict, Lawrence's parents and numerous political figures thanked the newspaper for taking the potential financial risk involved with the 1997 headline.

Stephen Gately

On 16 October 2009, a Jan Moir article criticised aspects of the life and death of Stephen Gately. It was published six days after his death and before his funeral. The Press Complaints Commission received over 25,000 complaints, a record number, regarding the timing and content of the article. It was criticised as insensitive, inaccurate and homophobic. The Press Complaints Commission did not uphold complaints about the article. Major advertisers, such as Marks & Spencer, had their adverts removed from the Mail Online webpage containing Moir's article.

Cannabis use

On 13 June 2011, a study by 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 and Le Figaro, among 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." The group Cannabis Law Reform (CLEAR), which campaigns for ending drug prohibition, criticised the Daily Mail report. Matt Jones, co-author of the study, said he was "disappointed but not surprised" by the article, and stated: "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", 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."

Ralph Miliband article

In September 2013, the Mail was criticised for an article on Ralph Miliband (late father of then Labour-leader Ed Miliband and prominent Marxist sociologist), titled "The Man Who Hated Britain". Ed Miliband said that the article was "ludicrously untrue", that he was "appalled" and "not willing to see my father's good name be undermined in this way". Ralph Miliband had arrived in the UK from Belgium as a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust. The Jewish Chronicle described the article as "a revival of the 'Jews can't be trusted because of their divided loyalties' genre of antisemitism." Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith linked the article to the Nazi sympathies of the 1st Viscount Rothermere, whose family remain the paper's owners.

The paper defended the article's general content in an editorial, but described its use of a picture of Ralph Miliband's grave as an "error of judgement". In the editorial, the paper further remarked that "We do not maintain, like the jealous God of Deuteronomy, that the iniquity of the fathers should be visited on the sons. But when a son with prime ministerial ambitions swallows his father's teachings, as the younger Miliband appears to have done, the case is different." A spokesman for the paper also described claims that the article continued its history of antisemitism as "absolutely spurious." However, the reference to "the jealous God of Deuteronomy" was criticised by Jonathan Freedland, who said that "In the context of a piece about a foreign-born Jew, [the remark] felt like a subtle, if not subterranean hint to the reader, a reminder of the ineradicable alienness of this biblically vengeful people" and that "those ready to acquit the Mail because there was no bald, outright statement of antisemitism were probably using the wrong measure."

Gawker Media lawsuit

In March 2015, James King, a former contract worker at the Mail's New York office, wrote an article for Gawker titled 'My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online'. In the article, King alleged that the Mail's approach was to rewrite stories from other news outlets with minimal credit in order to gain advertising clicks, and that staffers had published material they knew to be false. He also suggested that the paper preferred to delete stories from its website rather than publish corrections or admit mistakes.

In September 2015, the Mail's US company Mail Media filed a $1 million lawsuit against King and Gawker Media for libel. Erik Wemple at The Washington Post questioned the value of the lawsuit, stating that "Whatever the merits of King's story, it didn't exactly upend conventional wisdom" about the website's strategy. In November 2016, Lawyers for Gawker filed a motion to resolve the lawsuit. Under the terms of the motion, Gawker was not required to pay any financial compensation, but agreed to add an Editor's Note at the beginning of the King article, remove an illustration in the post which incorporated the Daily Mail's logo, and publish a statement by DailyMail.com in the same story.

Anti-refugee cartoon

Following the November 2015 Paris attacks, a cartoon in the Daily Mail by Stanley McMurtry ("Mac") linked the European migrant crisis (with a focus on Syria in particular) to the terrorist attacks, and criticised the European Union immigration laws for allowing Islamist radicals to gain easy access into the United Kingdom. Despite being compared to Nazi propaganda, and criticised as racist, the cartoon received praise on the Mail Online website. A Daily Mail spokesperson told The Independent: "We are not going to dignify these absurd comments which wilfully misrepresent this cartoon apart from to say that we have not received a single complaint from any reader". Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK, criticised the Daily Mail's cartoon for being "reckless xenophobia".

Anthony Weiner scandal

In September 2016, the Mail Online published a lengthy interview and screenshots from a 15-year-old girl who claimed that the American politician Anthony Weiner had sent her sexually explicit images and messages. The revelation led to Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin – an aide of Hillary Clinton – separating. Weiner pleaded guilty in May 2017 to sending obscene material to a minor, and in September he was jailed for 21 months.

Campaigns against plastic pollution

The paper has campaigned against plastic pollution in various forms since 2008. The paper called for a levy on single use plastic bags. The Daily Mail's work in highlighting the issue of plastic pollution was praised by the head of the United Nations Environment Program, Erik Solheim at a conference in Kenya in 2017. Emily Maitlis, the newscaster, asked Green Party leader Caroline Lucas on Newsnight, 'Is the biggest friend to the Environment at the moment the Daily Mail?' in reference to the paper's call for a ban on plastic microbeads and other plastic pollution, and suggested it had done more for the environment than the Green Party. Environment group ClientEarth has also highlighted the paper's role in drawing attention to the plastic pollution problem along with the Blue Planet II documentary.

Gary McKinnon deportation

Attempts by the United States government to extradite Gary McKinnon, a British computer hacker, were campaigned against by the paper. In 2002, McKinnon was accused of perpetrating the "biggest military computer hack of all time" although McKinnon himself states that he was merely looking for evidence of free energy suppression and a cover-up of UFO activity and other technologies potentially useful to the public. The Daily Mail began to support McKinnon's campaign in 2009 – with a series of front-page stories protesting against his deportation.

On 16 October 2012, after a series of legal proceedings in Britain, Home Secretary Theresa May withdrew her extradition order to the United States. Gary McKinnon's mother Janis Sharp praised the paper's contribution to saving her son from deportation in her book in which she said: 'Thanks to Theresa May, David Cameron and the support of David Burrowes and so many others – notably the Daily Mail – my son was safe, he was going to live.'

Abd Ali Hameed al-Waheed

In December 2017, the Daily Mail published a front-page story entitled "Another human rights fiasco!", with the subheading "Iraqi 'caught red-handed with bomb' wins £33,000 – because our soldiers kept him in custody for too long". The story related to a judge's decision to award money to Abd Ali Hameed al-Waheed after he had been unlawfully imprisoned. The headline was printed despite the fact that during the trial itself the judge concluded that claims that al-Waheed had been caught with a bomb were "pure fiction".

In July 2018, the Independent Press Standards Organisation ordered the paper to publish a front-page correction after finding the newspaper had breached rules on accuracy in its reporting of the case. The Daily Mail reported that a major internal investigation was conducted following the decision to publish the story, and as a result, "strongly worded disciplinary notes were sent to seven senior members of staff", which made it clear "that if errors of the same nature were to happen again, their careers would be at risk".

Doctored image of Korean soldiers in Ukraine

On 4 December 2024, the Daily Mail published an online story about the Russo-Ukrainian War under the headline "Kim Jong Un sends North Korean women to fight as cannon fodder for Putin in Ukraine". The story was accompanied by a photo of what appeared to be two Korean women in combat fatigues. It was later revealed that the photo was an older image of two Russian soldiers whose facial features had been doctored to appear Korean. According to Mediaite, the Daily Mail "received backlash and ridicule on social media before it removed the article and issued a correction notice".

Lawsuits

2017, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre threatened the website Byline Investigates with legal action and insisted on the removal of three articles about the Daily Mail's use of private investigator Steve Whittamore.

On 15 November 2019, Byline Investigates published court documents of a lawsuit filed by Meghan Markle against the Daily Mail in which she accused the newspaper of a campaign of "untrue" stories.

Successful lawsuits against the Mail

2001, February: Businessman Alan Sugar was awarded £100,000 in damages following a story commenting on his stewardship of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.

2003, October: Actress Diana Rigg was awarded £30,000 in damages over a story commenting on aspects of her personality.

2006, May: Musician Elton John received £100,000 damages following false accusations concerning his manners and behaviour.

2009, January: £30,000 award to Austen Ivereigh, who had worked for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, following false accusations made by the newspaper concerning abortion.

2010, July: £47,500 award to Parameswaran Subramanyam for falsely claiming that he secretly sustained himself with hamburgers during a 23-day hunger strike in Parliament Square to draw attention to the protests against the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009.

2011, November: the former lifestyle adviser Carole Caplin received damages over claims in the Mail that she would reveal intimate details about former clients.

2014, May: Author J. K. Rowling received "substantial damages" and the Mail printed an apology. The newspaper had made a false claim about Rowling's story written for the website of Gingerbread, a single parents' charity.

2017, April: First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, received an undisclosed settlement over claims in the Mail that she had worked as an escort in the 1990s. In September 2016, she began litigation against the Daily Mail for an article which discussed escort allegations. The article included rebuttals and said that there was no evidence to support the allegations. The Mail regretted any misinterpretation that could have come from reading the article, and retracted it from its website. Melania Trump filed a lawsuit in Maryland, suing for $150 million. On 7 February 2017, the lawsuit was re-filed in the correct jurisdiction, New York, where the Daily Mail's parent company has offices, seeking damages of at least $150 million.

Unsuccessful lawsuits

1981, April: The Daily Mail won £750,000 from the Unification Church, which had sued for libel due to articles about the Church's recruitment methods. Margaret Singer, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Berkeley, testified that the Mail's accounts of these methods were accurate. The trial lasted over five months, one of Britain's longest-ever civil trials.

2012, February: Nathaniel Rothschild lost his libel case against the Daily Mail, after the High Court agreed that he was indeed the "Puppet Master" for Peter Mandelson, that his conduct had been "inappropriate in a number of respects" and that the words used by the Daily Mail were "substantially true".

2012, May: Carina Trimingham, the partner of former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Chris Huhne, was ordered to pay more than £400,000 after she lost her High Court claims for damages for alleged breach of privacy and harassment against the Daily Mail. Huhne, whilst married, had an affair with Trimingham – who herself was in a lesbian civil partnership – and then later left his wife Vicky Pryce for Trimingham. This and a series of other events involving Pryce and Huhne led to his resignation from the Cabinet, and to both of them being arrested for perverting the course of justice and the criminal prosecution R v Huhne and Pryce.

2021: Former US congress representative Katie Hill was judicially ordered to reimburse the Daily Mail and others $220,000 for legal fees incurred defending themselves against baseless revenge porn claims raised by Hill.

2026: Prince Harry and six others including Elton John and Doreen Lawrence lost a privacy case against the publisher of Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, with the allegation that the papers used illegal methods to obtain information for their news stories on them. The judge concluded that the claimants relied on suspicion and failed to provide proof of their allegations. The legal bill was expected to cost the claimants up to £50 million.

Legal action by the Daily Mail

In March 2021, Associated Newspapers issued a letter to ViacomCBS to remove an image of a purported Daily Mail headline from Oprah with Meghan and Harry. The headline seen was "Meghan's seed will taint our Royal Family", which had been edited to remove the context that it was a quotation by an unrelated politician.

Criticism

Paying for footage under investigation

In 2015, following the November 2015 Paris attacks, the French police viewed the footage of the attacks from the CCTV system of La Casa Nostra. After making a copy on a USB flash drive, the police ordered a technician from the CCTV company that installed the system to encrypt the footage, saying 'this now falls under the confidentiality of the investigation, it must remain here'. Freelance journalist Djaffer Ait Aoudia told The Guardian that he secretly filmed a Daily Mail representative negotiating with the owner to sell the CCTV footage of the attacks. The café owner agreed to supply the footage for €50,000 and asked an IT technician to make the footage accessible again. The Daily Mail responded: "There is nothing controversial about the Mail's acquisition of this video, a copy of which the police already had in their possession." The Guardian also, briefly, embedded the footage on their own website before removing it.

Byline removal

In 2017, evoke.ie, the Daily Mail's showbiz site, was reported to the internship program of Dublin City University after the bylines of hundreds of articles written by students were changed.

Sensationalism

The newspaper has also been criticised for its extent of coverage of celebrities, the children of celebrities, property prices, and the depiction of asylum seekers, the latter of which was discussed in the Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights in 2007.

Reliability

The Daily Mail's medical and science journalism has been criticised by some doctors and scientists, accusing it of using minor studies to generate scare stories or being misleading. Ben Goldacre, writing in The Guardian, said that the Daily Mail have an "ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into ones that either cause or prevent cancer".

Carbon Brief complained to the Press Complaints Commission about an article published in the Daily Mail titled "Hidden green tax in fuel bills: How a £200 stealth charge is slipped on to your gas and electricity bills" because the £200 figure was unexplained, unreferenced and, according to Ofgem, incorrect. The Daily Mail quietly removed the article from their website.

In 2013, the Met Office criticised an article about climate change in the Daily Mail by James Delingpole for containing "a series of factual inaccuracies". The Daily Mail in response published a letter from the Met Office chairman on its letters page, as well as offering to append the letter to Delingpole's article.

In August 2018, the Mail Online deleted a lengthy news article titled "Powder Keg Paris" by journalist Andrew Malone which focused on "illegal migrants" living in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis, after a string of apparent inaccuracies were highlighted on social media by French activist Marwan Muhammad, including mistaking Saint-Denis, the city, for Seine-Saint-Denis, the department northeast of Paris. Local councillor Majid Messaoudene said that the article had set out to "stigmatise" and "harm" the area and its people. The journalist, Andrew Malone, subsequently deleted his Twitter account. In 2019, the IPSO ruled against the Daily Mail and confirmed in its ruling that the article was inaccurate.

In early 2019, the mobile version of the Microsoft Edge web browser started warning visitors to the MailOnline site, via its NewsGuard plugin, that "this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability" and "has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases". In late January 2019, the status of the MailOnline was changed by the NewsGuard Plugin from Red to Green, updating its verdict to "this website generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability". An Editor's Note from NewsGuard stated that "This label now has the benefit of the dailymail.co.uk's input and our view is that in some important respects their objections are right and we were wrong".

Racism accusations

There have been accusations of racism against the Daily Mail. In 2012, in an article for The New Yorker, former Mail reporter Brendan Montague criticised the Mail's content and culture, stating: "None of the front-line reporters I worked with were racist, but there's institutional racism [at the Daily Mail]".

In August 2020, a group of Palm Islanders in Queensland, Australia, lodged a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 against the Daily Mail and 9News, alleging that they had broadcast and published reports that were inaccurate and racist about the Indigenous Australian recipients of compensation after the Palm Island Class Action.

Supplements and features

City & Finance: The business part of the Daily Mail, featuring City news and the results from the London Stock Exchange. It also has its own award-winning website called This is Money, which describes itself as the "money section of the MailOnline."

Travelmail: Contains travel articles, advertisements etc.

Femail: Femail is an extensive part of the Daily Mail's newspaper and website, being one of four main features on MailOnline others being News, TV & Showbiz and Sport. It is designed for women.

Weekend: The Daily Mail Weekend is a TV guide published by the Daily Mail, included free with the Mail every Saturday. Weekend magazine, launched in October 1993, is issued free with the Saturday Daily Mail. The guide does not use a magazine-type layout but chooses a newspaper style similar to the Daily Mail itself. In April 2007, the Weekend had a major revamp. A feature changed during the revamp was a dedicated Freeview channel page.

Regular cartoon strips

Garfield

I Don't Believe It (discontinued)

Odd Streak

The Strip Show

Chloe and Co. (by Knight Features)

Up and Running (by Knight Features)

Fred Basset

Up and Running is a strip distributed by Knight Features and Fred Basset has followed the life of the dog of the same name in a two-part strip in the Daily Mail since 8 July 1963.

The long-running Teddy Tail cartoon strip, was first published on 5 April 1915 and was the first cartoon strip in a British newspaper. It ran for over 40 years to 1960, spawning the Teddy Tail League Children's Club and many annuals from 1934 to 1942 and again from 1949 to 1962. Teddy Tail was a mouse, with friends Kitty Puss (a cat), Douglas Duck and Dr. Beetle. Teddy Tail is always shown with a knot in his tail.

Year Book

The Daily Mail Year Book first appeared in 1901, summarising the news of the past year in one volume of 200 to 400 pages. Among its editors were Percy L. Parker (1901–1905), David Williamson (1914–1951), G. B. Newman (1955–1977), Mary Jenkins (1978–1986), P.J. Failes (1987), and Michael and Caroline Fluskey (1991).

Online media

The majority of content appearing in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday printed newspapers also forms part of that included in the MailOnline website. MailOnline is free to read and funded by advertising. In 2011 MailOnline was the second most visited English-language newspaper website worldwide. It has since then become the most visited newspaper website in the world, with over 189.5 million visitors per month, and 11.7 million visitors daily, as of January 2014.

Thailand's military junta blocked the MailOnline in May 2014 after the site revealed a video of Thailand's Crown Prince and his wife, Princess Srirasmi, partying. The video appears to show the allegedly topless princess, a former waitress, in a tiny G-string as she feeds her pet dog cake to celebrate its birthday.

The Daily Mail in pop culture

In 1966 The Beatles released the song Paperback Writer in which the protagonist worked for the Daily Mail. Discussing Paperback Writer with Alan Smith of the NME that year, McCartney recalled that he and John Lennon wrote the lyrics in the form of a letter beginning with "Dear Sir or Madam", but that the song was not inspired by "any real-life characters". However, according to a 2007 piece in The New Yorker, McCartney said he started writing the song in 1965 after reading in the Daily Mail about an aspiring author, "possibly Martin Amis" (who would have been a teenager at the time). The Daily Mail was Lennon's regular newspaper and copies were in Lennon's Weybridge home when Lennon and McCartney were writing songs.

The Daily Mail has appeared in several novels. These include Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop which was based on Waugh's experiences as a writer for the Daily Mail. In the book the newspaper is renamed The Daily Beast.

The newspaper appeared in Nicci French's 2008 novel The Memory Game, a psychological thriller.

In 2015, it featured in Laurence Simpson's comic novel about the tabloid media, According to The Daily Mail.

Editors

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