A Little Ignorance is a Dangerous Thing

Dear Sir or Madam,


I was surprised when I read your article entitled ‘No Child is Safe’ (15/05/08). My surprise was mainly due to your blatant ignorance of both a journalist’s duty to inform correctly, and of how to maintain any grip on reality as you publish the garbage you call news. As I peruse the daily issues day after day, as reported in your fascist tabloid, (it is provided through my school – I would never spend money on such rubbish) I am filled with despair that as your fanatical paper gets more and more widely read, the average degree of intelligence, wisdom, and integrity falls lower and lower.


You open the report with a story provided by the parents of poor Hannah Bond. I mean no ill will to the family of this poor schoolgirl, but might I suggest were my parents as out of touch with my lifestyle as Hannah’s obviously were, I would struggle to stay happy and not to ‘give up’. I cannot say how much of what the Bond’s report is actually true, and what is fallacy made up by yourselves, the parents, or the child, but I can deny the accuracy of the report.


Your opening paragraphs describing ‘emo’ are riddled with mistakes. Blink 182, one of the bands mentioned, broke up before being emo became popular, and their songs rarely, if anything mentioned (never mind ‘promoted’) death. “Does My Breath Smell?”, “Romeo and Rebecca”, and “I Like Your Hair” are just some of the many trivial and light hearted songs the band wrote – hardly filled ‘with emotional lyrics’. You then went on to describe a wrist slitting ‘initiation ceremony’, as if it was just another way to join a cult. This does nothing but cheapen the pain that many neglected and hurt children go through, and the only outlet they can find that will perhaps bring them some care.


In fact, cheapen and lie is all your article really does do. Some of the inaccuracies you publish are astounding. Apparently Hannah Bond:


“Secretly chatted online to emo followers all over the world, talking about death, and of the ‘black parade’ – a place where emos believe they go to after they die.”


I can hardly believe she chatted to emo’s “all over the world” as the majority of these children, are shy, introvert, and hardly likely to address strangers in other countries. However, giving you the benefit of the doubt, I then read that emos believe they join the ‘black parade’, after death, as opposed to the more conventional afterlife. ‘The Black Parade’ was an album by ‘My Chemical Romance’, one of the bands mentioned earlier in your article. The idea of a black parade comes from singer Gerard Way, but is nothing more than an interesting lyric, and an interesting ponderance of death. They may well be talking about the Black Parade, but unless these children are as ill educated as some of your other articles (and indeed the average quality of the writing within The Daily Mail) would indicate, they do not believe they go there after death.


By this time, I was angered beyond belief, but, before relegating the paper to it’s rightful home in the bin, I carried on, hoping in vain, and against my better knowledge and experience of The Daily Mail, that the article would redeem itself. It did not. You carried on, making generalisations, inaccuracies, and generating pure lies until the very end. It seems as if the article was written by a ‘hoodie’ or a ‘chav’ – one of the many other young victims of The Daily Mail’s relentless campaign to distress, and to stir up hatred. The worst crime emo’s seemed to have been accused of is being emotional, and revelling in self-pity. Might I remind Tom Rawstorne, in his ignorance, that some of Britain’s most popular poetry was composed by a contingent of young people that did just that: The Romantic’s. In fact, a cursory glance across many of Keats’s poems reveal more emotional words, and more death-laden meanings than many emo bands can ever hope to achieve. Should we ban these? Is Ode to a Nightingale ‘deeply unhealthy’?


It seems your radical report on the state of young people in today’s society was typical of your shoddy journalistic style. Angry about something you know nothing about. I am not an emo, nor do I defend them. They annoy me, as they do many people. But they are not dangerous. They are not unhinged, and they are certainly not suicidal head cases like you make them out to be. By fuelling an argument against a style that has done, and will continue to do, no harm, the young children quoted in your article, demean depression, and also those that must turn to others, and other’s music to help them.


Once again The Daily Mail is guilty of producing a sub-standard article, in a sub-standard paper that fuels racism, fascist views, and incites hatred of all that is different. You cater to the ignorant, and the fearful, and knowingly take full advantage of the trust they place in your columns, opinions, and articles. As the ‘Daily Newspaper of the Year’, you have a duty to inform the country, and promote ideas of equality, righteousness, and morality, instead of writing down the populist, anti-government, anti-immigration, anti-capitalist shite that you moan about over breakfast.


Yours sincerely,


Mr G. Baggott


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