Daily Mail ‘longest running psychological experiment’
Daily Mail News: Scientists today revealed that the Daily Mail and Mail Online are the world’s longest running psychological experiment.
Director of the program, Professor Northcliffe, announced sadly that the Mail Project would shut down by the end of the year due to budget cuts.
“The Daily Mail was first published in 1896 to test the electorate’s commitment to stupid ideas,” said Northcliffe. “But it soon developed a more important psychiatric function: converting dangerous levels of bottled-up outrage into a more manageable form of impotent bigotry.”
Towards the end of its 115 year run the Mail Project was criticised for neglecting sections of the population who couldn’t benefit from what scientists called the ‘Outrage Release Effect.’
“The Daily Mail had a problem with reach, yes,” confessed Northcliffe. “Most sensible people rejected the newspaper, and therefore the Outrage Release Effect, because they disagreed with its horrifying and comical stance on topics like immigration (‘it’s bad’), everything (‘it causes cancer’), and Hitler’s Blackshirts (‘Hurrah!’)”
“So we invented the Mail Online,” said Northcliffe, “for left-leaning intellectuals who needed a safe outlet for their rage. We discouraged Daily Mail readers from viewing the site by printing a story about how the internet gives you cancer.”
The Mail Online was a runaway success, reaching a previously untapped audience: Of the site’s 65 million monthly visitors, 51.3 million of the avid, regular readers said that they “hate the Daily Mail with such a passion that they’d do almost anything to avoid buying it.” (fig.2)
The study concluded that although readers of the Mail Online and the Daily Mail were outraged by different things, they were “two sides of the same angry coin.” (fig.1)
News of the experiment has outraged people, whose outrage, in turn, has outraged other people. 1% of the population has been caught in an outrage loop, reporting a sense of outrage that they feel outrage that some people are outraged by other people’s outrage.
Sister psychological study, The Daily Express Project criticised the Mail Project as, “a criminal waste of tax payers’ money that indirectly caused cancer, promoted immigration and didn’t run enough articles about Princess Diana.” They went on to assure the Mail Project’s outrage junkies that they would, “do their utmost to fill the void.”
Story+Images: Toby Tripp