What a day it has been on Twitter, with the "#janmoir" article on Stephen Gatley's death being criticised for its homophobic views.
I've been tweeting on this all day and the point of the outage isn't that the Daily Mail is vile, everybody knows that, it's the sense that people now feel they have a platform to say "we're not going to stand for this anymore."
There are so far unconfirmed reports that the Mail has had to pull advertising from the Moir article. If this is true then it validates the Twitter and Facebook protests, which have also received support from high profile Twitter uses like Stephen Fry and Derren Brown.
Either way, it seems that this time the Mail has indeed gone too far. Some fellow journalists have bemoaned the fact that it will mean Moir is congratulated for a job well done but we won't know this until the news plays out tonight. Sky News are featuring it at 7pm and the Guardian continue to focus on the story.
I sincerely hope Moir is made to retract her sweeping accusations over the late Mr Gately and that the Mail is forced to apologise to his family.
This story is one to watch as a watermark for how much influence the Twitterati can have.
Good stuff Jon. I blogged on this a at the time too: http://jameswdcrawford.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/the-daily-mail-moirgate/
ReplyDeleteLoved the people power thing, but now a couple of days later I wonder if anything has changed? Was it a storm in a tea cup?
BBC Breakfast was covering wheel clampers this morning! Shouldn't they leave this crap to the regional media and the "cat stuck up tree" brigade? It was like nothing had happened.