Amanda Knox looked stunned this evening after she dramatically lost her prison appeal against her murder conviction.
– All very well, except, she didn’t dramatically lose, and she was in fact acquitted.
We all know that the Daily Mail repels the concepts of ‘fact’ and ‘honesty’, but this is an astoundingly incomprehensible tirade of bullshit, on levels never seen before.
So what happened?
Well, it seems that ingeniously posted an article by Nick Pisa, giving the wrong verdict, invented quotations, with an entirely fabricated story to back it up, before realising their horrendous mistake, and taking it down. Thankfully a friend of mine saved the article, which can be found here.
Let me treat you to some of the best bits from this beautiful failure:
Prosecutors were delighted with the verdict and said that ‘justice has been done’ although they said on a ‘human factor it was sad two young people would be spending years in jail’.
– Entirely fabricated
Following the verdict Knox and Sollecito were taken out of court escorted by prison guards and into a waiting van which took her back to her cell at Capanne jail near Perugia and him to Terni jail, 60 miles away.
Both will be put on a suicide watch for the next few days as psychological assessments are made on each of them but this is usual practice for long term prisoners.
– Fabricated to the point in which I’m wondering if this is simply an attempt at post-modern art. Fuck the rules! Distort reality! …… yes, that must be it, it couldn’t possibly be that the Daily Mail is the Journalistic equivalent of when you’d write the top line of a story, and then cover it up and ask your friend to write the next line, only to reveal a muddled and incomprehensible tirade of bullshit…… but at least you’d do it knowing it was a bit of a game, rather than a serious piece of journalism, that actually, quite unbelievably, helps to shape public discourse.
Still, it makes a change from their usual route of making sure a docile British public has a continued hatred for anyone with a slightly darker skin complexion.
Futile Democracy 
Well OK I agree with nearly everything you say here about the DM – except I’m not sure it’s about making sure ‘a docile British public has a continued hatred for anyone with a slightly darker skin complexion’.
I don’t think they’re that ideological. This is all about money.
They are (basically) owned by Harold Jonathan Esmond Vere Harmsworth, the 4th Viscount Rothermereir, who is a tax exile in France I think, so he doesn’t pay any tax in the UK.
His agenda is mostly to support the right-wing of the Conservative party, who he believes are the best party to protect his UK assets. The ‘news’ problem the DM has, as you’ve illustrated above, stems from the fact that the actual collection of news is completely secondary to the agenda I’ve just mentioned. IMO, the journos at the DM couldn’t see any way the Amanda Knox story could support their boss’s agenda, so they decided not to waste much time on it by pre-writing the story to cover all eventualities.
I think if a black Conservative leader, for example, emerged who Harold thought would further his personal agenda (as unlikely as that might be), I think you’d find the DM would support him (or her).
By the way, it seems they don’t like Cameron much, who they probably think isn’t right-wing enough.