Sunday 20 May 2012

BuffTheBanana.co.uk skewer Mail's hypocrisy

USEFUL TERM: CLICKBAIT - the practice of using celebrity names in article, or tags or images, to attract online hits. Provocative opinion pieces can also achieve this by attracting large numbers of (angry!) comments.

The language is a little crude, but the point is simple enough: the site seeks to explore what it sees as the hypocrisy of the socially conservative, pro-censorship, routinely morally outraged Mail and its extensive use of pornographic-style paparazzi shots. Here's the site's own description:
Buff the Banana with Paul Dacre is here to help you locate the most titillating content from the Daily Mail, without the fear of coming across something offensive.
Buff exists to show how Paul Dacre has exploited pornography to draw in readers. As Olivia Lichtenstein, the tabloid’s de facto erotica correspondent explains, ‘pornography today permeates society… [and] it’s addictive as cocaine’.
If you’re looking for good quality photos of celebrities frolicking in their bikinis or stripped down to the latest designer lingerie, Buff the Banana with Paul Dacre is for you. Many of the shots are candid, often taken ‘Peeping Tom style’ with a long lens.
Probably the most effective newspaper editor of his generation (read the biography), Paul Dacre is best known for creating a populist tabloid, famed for its right wing views and staunch social conservatism. But this is well documented elsewhere.
Under Paul Dacre’s leadership, the Daily Mail has worked hard to bring you the results of the ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ that so often cause celebrities to reveal a little more than intended – like a nipple. Visitors looking for something a little harder, should check out the upskirts. A little girl-on-girl action never goes amiss and there is often something for the ladies.
Clicking through to one of these, there was a particularly example of this willingness to use sexually titillating material, and even headlines, to drive traffic/hits in one of the sidebar stories: see the screenshot picture below, taken 20.5.12.
The 'story' is simply that this celeb (I'm assuming she's 'famous') has a large chest and wore a tight jumper.

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