Paper Monitor
11:26 UK time, Tuesday, 17 April 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The shootings in Virginia predictably dominate every front page, but aside from the straight reporting, eyewitness accounts, rundowns of previous "school" massacres and heavy use of pictures, is there anything more to add? The Daily Telegraph drives the story forward more than most, with the musings of a behavioural scientist. And sniffing the merest scent of an argument about this justifying Britain's tough gun laws, it weighs in with a heavy fist to remind us gun crime is rising in the UK, not falling. But its front page line about this being the "worst mass shooting in the US" surely stretches the bounds of believability for anyone who knows a thing or two about the Civil War or the Wounded Knee Massacre.
The tragic events in Virginia mask the fact that, with Defence Secretary Des Browne still resolutely in his job and interest in Kate and Wills tapering to a glorified picture caption in every royal watcher's bible, the Daily Mail, it is, as insiders might say, a quiet news day.
Then there's the Daily Mail's Nirpal Dhaliwal. Paper Monitor aficionados may recall this column's ennui at the musings of columnist Liz Jones, who used to document the decline of her marriage in the pages of the Mail. Mr Dhaliwal is, or was, Mr Liz Jones - Paper Monitor never quite got round to checking whether the couple finally called it a day. He too is possessed of strong feelings about male-female relationships and happy to issue-forth with 2,000 words or so on the subject of "WHY MEN AND WOMEN HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON (EXCEPT SEX)". It's an opportunity for the readers to, once again, indulge in the minutiae of the Jones-Dhaliwal marriage and some sweeping generalisations… eg: "no man is aroused by the thought of a warm breath against his neck"… "women think and think about their lives"… "no intelligent man spontaneously asks a woman to marry him"… and so on.
Just in case this sort blatent of reader-baiting doesn't rile its audience enough, the Mail makes it abundantly clear just how controversial Mr Dhaliwal's opinions are with a strap across the top of the page: "A brazenly provocative blast that will enrage BOTH sexes". Or, as Mrs Merton used to say: "Let's have a heated debate".
The 
