“The Wicked Flee When No Man Pursueth”

Posted by Ada Coddington

With well over a billion monthly views, Britain’s populist and pugnacious Daily Mail is one of the world’s most widely-read newspapers on the Internet, having twice the traffic of the Washington Post and five times that of the Wall Street Journal, even sometimes approaching the readership of the New York Times. The publication has stayed true to its original tabloid roots and its success comes from its willingness to wholeheartedly jump on those controversial stories that other outlets avoid.

Meanwhile, the British Lancet is located at the opposite end of the spectrum of respectability, being one of the world’s most prestigious and authoritative medical journals, as sober and responsible as any publication in existence.

So very early last Thursday morning the world witnessed a bizarre “Clash of the Titans” style controversy as an explosive headline in the Daily Mail denounced the Lancet for supposedly indulging in sensationalism.