Until last week, when George Clooney excoriated the Daily Mail for fabricating a story about his future mother-in-law, the newspaper’s most prominent sworn enemy was Hugh Grant. As I wrote in a 2012 Profile of the paper, Grant mounted a dauntless attack on the Mail during the Leveson Inquiry into the practices of the British press, deconstructing detail by detail a story that the Mail on Sunday had run about him and a “charming, married, middle-aged lady” with whom, as it happened, Grant was not having an affair. Grant claimed that the only way the paper could have gotten the voicemail that prompted the piece was by hacking his phone. The Mail struck back, releasing a statement that read, “Mr. Grant’s allegations are mendacious smears driven by his hatred of the media.” (The “mendacious” part was rich, given that the Mail had admitted that the story was untrue and paid Grant damages.) Jeering stories soon appeared in the Mail’s pages. Later, Grant spoke to the BBC about the experience. “I can see why they’re cross, because for once someone has had the courage to question their probity and their honesty,” he said. “Generally speaking, if anyone does that with a paper like the Daily Mail, however much they may go on about freedom of speech, no one is allowed the freedom of speech to question the Daily Mail. If you do, you will be trashed.”
Grant is right: for all its charms, the Mail is a machine for wasting reputations. Sometimes civilians are its fodder, “monstered” like so many recyclables that got thrown in with the garbage. The paper demonstrates particular efficiency and relish in shredding the character of celebrities. When Paul Dacre, its editor, made his own appearance before Leveson, he asserted that “latitude should be given to papers who look into the lives of people who intrude into their own lives—in other words, into their own privacy.” If his argument was less than lucid—it seemed a bit like accusing a person who lets himself into his own house of breaking and entering, as a way to justify subsequent intrusions—it has, until now, been relatively easy to ply against challengers like Grant, who have, at times, had a hand in exposing themselves to unpleasant coverage. The Mail supplemented the hypocrisy statute with a morality clause, contending that lapses, often in the sexual realm, disqualify one from having a credible opinion about anything else. Mocking the “stern quartet of trouser-droppers” who had dared to testify at Leveson—Grant; the comic Steve Coogan; Max Mosley, the former Formula One executive; and Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative MP—Quentin Letts, a columnist for the Mail, asked, “So why the need for a law on privacy which would probably help chiefly lawyers, sado-masochist freaks, libidinous actors and passing totalitarians?”
The Mail, like all bullies, has quieted down in the face of a fair fight. It doesn’t seem to have found even a mildly tawdry means to impugn Clooney’s motives, and the false story was not a triviality. The paper reported that the mother of Amal Alamuddin, Clooney’s fiancée, had been telling “half of Beirut” that she was unhappy that her daughter wasn’t marrying a man from her own Druze community; there had been jokes, the Mail said, about killing the bride. The problem was that, as Clooney put it in a piece for USA Today, “Amal’s mother is not Druze. She has not been to Beirut since Amal and I have been dating, and she is in no way against the marriage.” Should the paper stand tall against a widely beloved actor-statesman interrupting his generally good-humored tolerance of all manner of dubious innuendo in order to defend the honor and security of his fiancée and her mother—and, more broadly, to guard against, as he wrote, the exploitation of “religious differences where none exist”? Even by Dacre’s standards, that would be audacious. The Mail’s quick and entirely uncharacteristic apology seemed to acknowledge that it knew itself to be outmatched. After weak references to a freelance journalist and a source of some kind, the paper said that it would “accept” that its story was wrong. Clooney—perhaps the world’s only monster-proof celebrity—responded by rejecting the apology. (“The coverup is always worse,” he wrote.) Unlike Grant, he was seeking not relief but redress.
The second reason that this fight was different is that Clooney is an American celebrity, one who has not been conditioned to fear the Mail in the often cruel and parochial world of the British press. He is bigger, both in market reach and in stature, than anyone the paper has come up against. (The royal family is the possible exception, but it can’t take its grievances to USA Today.) He doesn’t live in England. He wouldn’t know Paul Dacre from an assistant gaffer. What’s the Daily Mail to George Clooney? When the Mail insults a celebrity in Britain, it antagonizes exactly one constituency: the celebrity. But with the lie about Clooney it has also scuttled whatever solidarity it might have had with the American press, while alerting the American public to the fact that, as Will Oremus wrote at Slate, “it does not deserve to be taken seriously.” Mail Online—the faster, looser sibling of the daily paper, which was never a model student to begin with—is in the midst of a push into America. It recently poached the C.O.O. of BuzzFeed and enlisted Kim Kardashian to appear at a party. Incurring the wrath of the country’s most popular actor, for good reason, was the equivalent of hiring a plane to drag a banner of disreputability over its beachhead.
When I interviewed Dacre at the Mail’s headquarters in 2012, he said that he considered it a compliment when his critics accused him of moralizing. “The family is the greatest institution on God’s green earth,” he said. The idea was that he was on the side of hearth and home, up against the philandering celebrities. With the Clooney affair, the Mail has thrown its supposedly most sacred cow on top of the trash heap.
Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty.