As editor of Here's an amusing little story from London. The Daily Mail newspaper in February launched a Banish the Bags campaign, "in an effort to rid the country of single-use plastic bags, the most ubiquitous feature of our disposable society."
Now The Daily Express (which touts itself as the "World's Greatest Newspaper") has revealed (I couldn't resist using one Britishism...) that its rival's war on plastic bags is hypocritical, since the Daily Mail actually owns a company that makes plastic bags. Here's an excerpt from the big bag scoop:
The hypocritical Daily Mail told yesterday how plastic waste is tipping Britains seas towards ecological disaster. Fish, mammals and birds will be driven to extinction within decades, it said. ... But the newspaper failed to tell its readers that the company that owns the Daily Mail also owns a firm which produces plastic bags.The High Speed Bagging CompÂany Limited, based in east London, wraps the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday, in polythene bags for weekend promotions.
It wraps millions of printed products in plastic bags, according to industry experts. And these are the sort of plastics that are increasingly poisoning the world's oceans.
Environmentally conscious readers will be appalled to know that the newspaper group needlessly produces millions of plastic bags, known as polybags in the trade.
In the years since the firm began using polybags, millions of plastic-wrapped copies of its newspapers have been returned unsold by increasingly fed-up newsagents, adding to the mountain of plastic waste.
Just a bit of editorializing there.
It will be interesting to see how the Daily Mail responds. I imagine they can argue that the bags are recyclable, and that customers prefer to get their papers dry and in good condition.
Comments (1)
Don:
Today's Daily Express is not "the world's greatest newspaper" by any stretch of the imagination.
But it may once have been.
It has certainly been one of the largest circulating newspapers, with sales above four million a day in the 1940s and 1950s, compared with today's circulation of about 740,000 a day.
As a cub reporter in the 1960s I remember that when Lord Beaverbrook, its owner and the most powerful man on Fleet Street at the time, died in 1964 the newspaper's editors removed the chains from a knight who stood to the right (or maybe the left) of the masthead. It was a sign (or so the story goes) that they were finally free of Beaverbrook's interference in editorial decisions (dramatic stuff indeed!).
Despite Beaverbrook, it was a proper newspaper in those broadsheet days, rather than the gossipy tabloid of today.
Please see the following from November 2000, by James Lawton, who writes for The Independent, of London.
"When I joined the Daily Express in the Sixties, it was a worry that circulation had dropped below four million, but you could still tell an Expressman by his camelhair coat, suede shoes and superior air.
"The Duke of Edinburgh said it was a 'bloody awful' newspaper, but among his peers, the Expressman was envied both for his expense account and the superb professionalism of his newspaper.
"When I left, a few months ago, circulation was around a million and the sadness could be relieved only by assurances that one hadn't been entirely responsible for the loss of three million copies and a blazing identity."
Rgds.
Posted by Stephen Downer | October 17, 2008 4:06 PM
Posted on October 17, 2008 16:06