Another silly woman writes for The Daily Mail

We had this when the Byron report came out. Anne Diamond wrote a very silly piece in The Mail complete with badly photoshopped picture and had ridicule poured on her from all sides.

Now another woman, this time called Rosie Millard, has written an article in The Daily Mail that she bought her four children a really great toy. But they had to share it between them. And when this led to trouble she was surprised. She is obviously too busy writing articles to even vaguely understand how children work. The fact that the toy was a Nintendo DS has nothing to do with this. It is expecting four children to share what must be one of the best toys ever.

If she had wanted them to share she should have bought them a Wii.

Now to the serious bit. Rosie bought the DS from Hong Kong for £150 including “a ‘bundle’ of 20 games including Brain Trainer, Fifa 08, and Nintendogs.”  At this price one has to think that these are pirated. Which would make Rosie a thief. Which she has now pretty much owned up to on the pages of a national newspaper. Silly, like I keep saying.

And depriving her children of video games is not good for them. There is a huge amount of research that games benefit children in many ways. So by depriving hers, Rosie is losing these benefits.

It is a bit sad that The Daily Mail continue to repeatedly pay people to write about video games who haven’t the faintest idea what they are writing about. Because the majority of the population now do understand video games. So The Mail is increasingly distancing itself from it’s readership. Which isn’t too clever.

Meanwhile, in The Observer, Catherine Bennett proves that some newspapers know what is happening in the world and have credible journalists to report it. In an excellent, well thought out and informed article she says: “there appears to be no evidence to support the Clinton/Obama/Vaz line on game-enhanced violence or underachievement. On the contrary, this moral panic appears to owe much to myths about high-school killers, while plenty of research suggests, as a Commons select committee has just heard, that gaming can improve children’s ‘confidence, their sense of social standing, their ability to multitask, their ability to receive conflicting bits of information’.” Rosie Millard would do well to read this article, she could learn a lot.

I know I keep on about this subject, but when national newspapers like The Daily Mail are wantonly misleading their readers so badly it is an issue of public concern.

 

12 Comments


  1. What really gets me with the national newspapers is the double standards they set. On the one hand most of them (tabloids) are anti-Europe and very pro-Britain, and whenever our national football team scrapes a 1-0 win over a team with no footballing history it is written up as the golden new age of English football. Yet with video games Great Britain is a world leader in one of the most popular entertainment industries with huge potential for growth, and not to mention what the sales of games and hardware is doing to help bolster a failing high street spend in this country… and all we get is bad press on the whole.

    When the older generations are past caring about this “issue” and the younger generation are in power I hope the Dailt Mail et al are ready to eat some serious humble pie.


  2. Hmm. It seems to be impossible to add a comment to that article.


  3. I think this woman sounds as ignorant and silly as the next guy, BUT is it not possible that she ordered the DS and software bundle second-hand from ebay?
    I’ve ordered plenty of items from Hong Kong and Singapore from ebay.
    And although it is highly unlikely that she bought goods from Hong Kong that ar also second-hand, it is a possiblity and does stop our evidence from being water tight.
    Also the original article said she gave the DS away. So we have no evidence, unless you want to trace the seller from her credit card receipts.
    Either way it sounds like a lot of effort to prove.
    Good luck filtering through her wheelie bin.


  4. I’ve never got a comment on these articles. They’re not offensive and they’re not threatening and they don’t insult the Daily Mail in any way. I just don’t agree with their article and I don’t get my comment published…
    But seriously, what next? Blame obesity on PacMan?


  5. That’s the Daily Mail for you. If your world view isn’t aligned with their myopic take on events, your opinion doesn’t exist.


  6. It wasn’t that they didn’t let me post. It was that I couldn’t pass the “type in these letters” test to stop spam …despite getting it right every time. Now, other articles have comments …isn’t it a little odd this one couldn’t?


  7. I have posted a comment to this article and had no issues with the image verification. I doubt they will publish it though as it concisely points out why the whole article is nonsensical.

    I used to be Daily Mail reader but have abandoned it due to ill thought out articles such as this one. They are becoming more like the Sun every week.


  8. I think the Daily mail are succeding in distancing themsleves from their audience. Every week at teh train station I see less and less people reading the Dail Mail, and more left wanting to be bought…


  9. Great article – the Daily Mail is fail no matter what subject it’s talking about but this just reinforces falsehoods. Kind of like when FOX did it’s little “report” on Mass Effect’s “pornography”.

    By the way, what’s up with constantly mentioning gender? I’m curious if you’d have used the words “blogger” or “parent” or something similar if not for the false idea that women don’t know anything about video games. Just seemed to stick out to me. :\

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