Express news

This morning, being greeted by the tawdry stuff that Microsoft News serves up to Microsoft Edge when I turn on my laptop in the morning, I started to wonder why lurid stories, often about the foul deeds of the bureaucrats of the European Union, from the Daily Express were so prominent. Microsoft being the company that provides the funds that the Bill & Melinda foundation can be so holy with.

One supposes that the answer is that along with Facebook, Microsoft knows that lurid tripe is what pulls in the punters. Sober truth is far too expensive to produce and is not want the punters want anyway. They want lurid.

That question settled, I moved onto the Express itself, an organ I vaguely thought was once owned by Lord Beaverbook, the chap that used to own the show-off pile called Cherkley Court, just outside Leatherhead. Now the show-off hotel featured at reference 1. Once the focus of an unseemly family squabble about who got all the pictures.

For some years later, the Express was owned by a pornographer. But the story there seemed to be that caught between the cross-fire from the 'Daily Mail' to the right and the 'Sun' to the left, there wasn't much money in it any more. Sold off to the Trinity Group - whose prize possession was the Daily Mirror - with the combined group becoming known as Reach, to be found at reference 2. Which I suppose, without checking, to be rather smaller than the rival Murdoch operation, Newscorp. 

A group also responsible for papers like the 'Daily Star' and the 'Daily Record', along with a clutch of once respectable provincial newspapers.

Editors of the Express look to come from red top backgrounds, often involving brushes with the law, and taking their line from the Independence Party, aka UKIP. While the current editor is trying to cement his position in the chumocracy which rules our once green and pleasant land by sending his son to Eton.

Reference 1: https://www.beaverbrook.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.reachplc.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.express.co.uk/. A website which knows all about the fetish noticed at reference 4 below as it is framed with lots of pictures of shoes from the very same people. While the snap above is taken from the 'Daily Star' website. Note the way that all the little panels get mixed in together, without regard to content.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/found-out.html.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2009/06/to-leatherhead-and-other-places.html. The unseemly dispute.