Karl wrote:I am sure there is a grain of truth in Rolf Dobelli's essay there, but the most interesting line of that article is at the end: "The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk". Bear in mind he is trying to sell you his self-help ideology.
Anyway, news being manipulative in general doesn't mean The Mail isn't significantly more vitriolic than The Guardian. Like I said on the last page, when The Guardian goes nuts it's about radical veganism; when The Mail goes nuts it incites bigotry. "They're both nuts sometimes" is a shallow analysis when the rhetoric and consequences are so different.
Karl, I feel that your arguments fall into a black / white type of reasoning when, in my view, there are shades of grey. My detour into that Guardian article was merely to indicate that quite often people are not open to discussion or evidence that doesn't immediately tie in with their thinking; and I wasn't directing that at anyone in particular, more suggesting that we all do it at times.
The Mail does publish some articles that grind and offend: I do not agree with the way they present some stories. But I believe that newspapers the world over do this... it sells papers. Sure, not all papers run stories that lean so far towards the "right" of politics - and, again, I am not saying that I like the way they do so - but I feel sure that not all papers run stories that lean towards the "left" as, say, the Mirror does.
Anyhow, I feel we are perhaps being diverted from the original point I made - that Virgin has made a surprisingly noisy song and dance about electing what papers it will sell to customers. I stick by my view that it would have done better to avoid loudly indicating a political preference that impacts customer choice. I know that it won't sell every paper available, but it felt odd to draw attention to this in the way that it did.