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Every weekday evening at around 9pm, in the Daily Mail’s headquarters in Kensington, west London, the slightly stooping, six-foot three-inch figure of Paul Dacre emerges into the main open-plan office where editors, sub-editors and designers are in the final stages of preparing pages for the next day’s paper. The atmosphere changes instantly; everyone becomes tense, as though waiting for a thunderstorm. Dacre begins with a low growl, like an angry tiger. His voice rises as several pages are denounced, along with those responsible. Imprecations reverberate across the office, sometimes punctuated by the strangely anomalous command to a senior colleague, “Don’t resist me, darling.” Pages must be replaced or redesigned, their order changed, headlines altered. New pictures are required with new captions. Dacre waves his long arms, hammers the air with his hands, shouts even louder and, if particularly agita­ted, scratches himself.
Nobody tries to argue. For all the fear and exasperation – “He never thinks of logistics and he has no idea of what’s an unreasonable request,” says one former sub-editor – there is also admiration. Dacre, Fleet Street’s best-paid editor, who earned almost £1.8m in 2012, has been in charge of the Mail since 1992 and, by general consent, is the most successful editor of his generation. The paper sells an average of 1.5 million copies on weekdays, 2.4 million on Saturdays. Only the Sun sells more but, on Saturdays, the Mail has just moved ahead. Its 4.3 million daily readers include more from the top three social classes (A, B and C1) than the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times combined. Its long-standing middle-market rival, the Daily Express, slightly ahead when Dacre took over, now sells less than a third as many copies.
Under Dacre, the Mail has won Newspaper of the Year six times in the annual British Press Awards – twice as many prizes as any other paper. If anything, its authority and clout have grown in the past two years as Rupert Murdoch’s Sun has struggled with the fallout from the hacking scandal. Politicians no longer fear Murdoch as they once did. They still fear Dacre. The opposition from Murdoch’s papers to the government’s proposals that a royal charter should regulate the press is muted. Dacre’s Mail is loud and clear about the threat to “our free press”. Summoned twice before the Leveson inquiry – the second time because he had accused the actor Hugh Grant of lying in his evidence – he didn’t give an inch.
Everyone who has ever worked for Dacre, who has just passed his 65th birthday, praises his almost uncanny instinct for the issues and stories that will hold the attention of “Middle England”. No other editor so deftly balances the mix of subjects and moods that holds readers’ attention: serious and frivolous, celebrities and ordinary people, urban, suburban and rural, some stories provoking anger, others tears. No other editor chooses, with such unerring and lethal precision, the issues, often half forgotten, that will create panic and fear among politicians. “He’s the most consummate newspaperman I’ve ever met,” says Charles Burgess, a former features editor who also occupied high-level roles at the Guardian and Independent. “He balances the flow of each day’s paper in his head.”
“He articulates the dreams, fears and hopes of socially insecure members of the suburban middle class,” says Peter Oborne, the Mail’s former political columnist now at the Daily Telegraph. “It’s a daily performance of genius.”
But Murdoch’s decline leaves the Mail under more scrutiny than ever. Is Dacre at last running out of road? Rumours circulate in the national newspaper industry that members of the Rothermere family, owners of the Daily Mail, are increasingly nervous of the controversy that Dacre stirs up, notably this year with its attack on Ralph Miliband, father of the Labour leader, as “the man who hated Britain”. More than any other editor since Kelvin MacKenzie ruled at the Sun – and, among other outrages, alleged that drunkenness among Liverpool football fans led to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 – Dacre attracts visceral loathing. His enemies see the Mail, to quote the Huffington Post writer and NS columnist Mehdi Hasan (who was duly monstered in the Mail’s pages), as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting”.
The loathing is returned, with interest. In Dacre’s mind, the country is run, in effect, by affluent metropolitan liberals who dominate Whitehall, the leadership of the main political parties, the universities, the BBC and most public-sector professions. As he once said, “. . . no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberal­ocracy”. The Mail, in his view, speaks for ordinary people, working hard and struggling with their bills, conventional in their views, ambitious for their children, loyal to their country, proud of owning their home, determined to stand on their own feet. These people, Dacre believes, are not given a fair hearing in the national media and the Mail alone fights for them. It is incomprehensible to him – a gross category error – that critics should be obsessed by the Mail’s power and influence when the BBC, funded by a compulsory poll tax, dominates the news market. It uses this position, he argues, to push a dogmatically liberal agenda, hidden behind supposed neutrality. Scarcely an issue of the Mail passes without a snipe and sometimes a full barrage in the news pages, leaders or signed opinion columns at BBC “bias”.
To its critics, however, the Mail is as biased as it’s possible to be, and none too fussy about the facts. In the files of the Press Complaints Commission, you will find records of 687 complaints against the Mail which led either to a PCC adjudication or to a resolution negotiated, at least partially, after the PCC’s intervention. The number far exceeds that for any other British newspaper: the files show 394 complaints against the Sun, 221 against the Daily Telegraph, 115 against the Guardian. The complaints will serve as a charge sheet against the Mail and its editor.
This year, the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had “targeted” Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming “rather than face a fresh medical”; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by windfarms was discarded. All these reports were false.
Mail executives argue that it gets more complaints than its rivals because it reaches more readers (particularly online, where the paper’s stories are repeated and others originate), prints more pages and tackles more serious and politically challenging issues. They point out that only six complaints were upheld after going through all the PCC’s stages and that the Sun and Telegraph, despite fewer complaints, had more upheld. But the PCC list, though it contains some of the Mail’s favourite targets such as asylum-seekers and “scroungers”, merely scratches the surface. Other complainants turned to the law. In the past ten years, the Mail has reported that the dean of RAF College Cranwell showed undue favouritism to Muslim students (false); the film producer Steve Bing hired a private investigator to destroy the reputation of his former lover Liz Hurley (false); the actress Sharon Stone left her four-year-old child alone in a car while she dined at a restaurant (false); the actor Rowan Atkinson needed five weeks’ treatment at a clinic for depression (false); a Tamil refugee, on hunger strike in Parliament Square, was secretly eating McDonald’s burgers (false); the actor Kate Winslet lied over her exercise regime (false); the singer Elton John ordered guests at his Aids charity ball to speak to him only if spoken to (false); Amama Mbabazi, the prime minister of Uganda, benefited personally from the theft of £10m in foreign aid (false). In all these cases, the Mail paid damages.
Then there are the subjects that the Mail and other right-wing papers will never drop. One is the EU, which, the Mail reported last year, proposed to ban books such as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series that portray “traditional” families. Another is local authorities, forever plotting to expel Christmas from public life and replace it with the secular festival of Winterval. It does not matter how often these reports are denied and their flimsy provenance exposed; the Mail keeps on running them and its columnists cite them as though they were accepted wisdom.
The paper gets away with publishing libels and falsehoods and with invasions of privacy because the penalties are insignificant. Often the victims can’t afford to sue and, if they can, the Mail group, with £282m annual profits even in these straitened times, can live with the costs. The PCC, even when its rules allow it to admit a complaint, has no powers to impose fines or to stipulate the prominence of corrections.
Besides, many victims don’t pursue complaints because they fear the stress of going to war with a powerful newspaper. They included the late writer Siân Busby who, the paper wrote in 2008, had received “the all-clear from lung cancer” after “a gruelling year”. In fact, the diagnosis had come less than six months earlier and she hadn’t received the “all-clear”. More important, as her husband, the BBC journalist Robert Peston, explained in the James Cameron Memorial Lecture in November this year, she wanted to keep the news out of the public domain to protect her children.
“The Mail got away with it,” Peston said. “As it often does.” (The Mail, in a statement after the lecture, said the information had been obtained from Busby herself and that the reporter had identified himself as a Mail writer.) In his 2008 book Flat Earth News, the Guardian journalist Nick Davies compared the paper to a footballer who, to protect his goal, will deliberately bring down an opponent. “Brilliant and corrupt,” Davies wrote, “the Daily Mail is the professional foul of contemporary Fleet Street.”
Even a list of official complaints and court cases doesn’t quite capture why the Mail attracts such fear and loathing. It has a unique capacity for targeting individuals and twisting the knife day after day, without necessarily lapsing into inaccuracies that could lead either to libel writs or censure by the PCC. For instance, as publication of the Leveson report on press regulation approached, the Mail devoted 12 pages of one issue – and several more pages of subsequent issues – to an “exposure” of Sir David Bell, a name then almost entirely unknown even to well-informed members of the public. A Leveson assessor and former Financial Times chairman, Bell was allegedly at the centre of a “quasi-masonic” network of “elitist liberals”, bent on gagging the press and preventing freedom of expression. This network, based on the “leadership” training organisation Common Purpose, had spawned the Media Standards Trust, of which Bell was a co-founder, which in turn had spawned the lobby group Hacked Off, an important influence on Leveson. To the Mail, this was a perfect illustration of how well-connected liberals, through networks of apparently innocuous organisations, conspire to undermine national traditions and values.
The paper also targets groups, often the weak and vulnerable. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain complained to the PCC that the Mail ran 80 headlines between 2006 and 2008 linking Poles to problems in the NHS and schools, unemployment among Britons, drug smuggling, rape and so on. Most of the stories, as the federation acknowledged, were newsworthy and largely accurate. The objection was to the way they were presented and to the drip, drip effect of continually highlighting the Polish connection so that, as the federation’s spokesman put it, the average reader’s heart “skips a beat . . . with either indignation or alarm”. The PCC eventually brokered a settlement that led to publication of a letter from the federation.

Yet there is something magnificent about the Mail’s confidence and single-mindedness. Other papers, trimming to focus groups, muffle their message, but the Mail projects its world-view relentlessly, with supreme technical skill, from almost every page. It is a paper led by its opinions, not by news. It is not noted for big exclusives, nor even for rapid reaction. “We were often known as the day-late paper,” a former reporter recalls. “Dacre wouldn’t really be interested in a story until he’d seen it somewhere else. We would sometimes give our exclusives to other journalists. Dacre surveys all the other papers, selects the right lines for the next day and follows them.”
Although Dacre has little enthusiasm for new technology – he still doesn’t have a computer on his desk – his paper is perfectly primed for the age of instant 24-hour news, when the challenge is not so much to find and report news as to select, interpret and elaborate on it. Long before other papers recognised the merits of a features-led or views-led approach, the Mail under Dacre was doing it.
The Mail gives its readers a sense of belonging in an increasingly complex and unsettling world. Part of the trick is to make the world seem more threatening than it is: crime is rising, migrants flooding the country, benefit scroungers swindling the taxpayer, standards of education falling, wind turbines taking over the countryside. Almost anything you eat or drink could give you cancer. Above all, the family – “the greatest institution on God’s green earth”, Dacre told a writer for the New Yorker last year – is under continuous assault. The Mail assures readers they are not alone in their anxieties about this changing world. It is a paper to be read, not on trains or buses or in offices, but in the peace and quiet of your home, preferably with an old-fashioned coal fire blazing in the hearth.
“Readers like certainty,” says a former Mail reporter. “Newspapers that have a wavering grip on their ideology are the ones that struggle. The Mail is like Coke. It’s consistent, reliable. Dacre is one of the best brand managers in the business. He lives the brand.”
Dacre lives mostly in the shadows. His two appearances before the Leveson inquiry gave the wider public a rare glimpse; apart from Desert Island Discs in 2004, he never appears on television or speaks on radio. If the Mail needs to defend itself (and it deigns to do so only in the most desperate circumstances), the job is assigned to an underling. Requests for on-the-record interviews are invariably refused, as they were for this article. A rare exception was made for the British Journalism Review, whose then editor, Bill Hagerty (a former editor of the People), in­terviewed Dacre in the tenth year of his editorship. There was also that audience with the New Yorker last year. Public lectures are equally unusual for him, though he gave the Cudlipp Lecture (in memory of Hugh Cudlipp, a Daily Mirror editor who was an early hero of his) in 2007, and addressed the Society of Editors in 2008.
Even former staff members mostly prefer not to be quoted when talking about Dacre. If they agree to be quoted, they wish the quotations to be checked with them before publication. BBC Radio 4 used actors for several contributions to a recent profile. The journalists’ fear is not only that they may be cut off from future employment or freelance work – “The Mail pays far better than anybody else and you don’t want to jeopardise the £2,000 cheque that might drop through the letter box,” said one writer – but also that the Mail may hit back. These concerns are shared by many politicians, who are equally reluctant to be quoted.
Dacre has few social graces and even less small talk. His body language is awkward, his manner prickly. He seldom smiles and, according to one ex-columnist, “He doesn’t laugh, he just says, ‘That’s a funny remark.’” He treats women with old-fashioned courtliness, opening doors and helping them with coats, but is otherwise uncomfortable with them, perhaps because he was one of five brothers, went to an all-male school and has no daughters. He speaks gruffly, with a slight north London accent and an even fainter trace of his father’s native Yorkshire. He sometimes buries his rather florid face deep in his hands, as though exasperated with the world’s inability to share his simple, common-sense values. He became notorious for the ripeness of his language – so frequent was his use of the C-word, almost entirely directed at men, that his staff referred to “the vagina monologues” – but when Charles Burgess told him women didn’t like hearing it he was profusely apologetic. On Desert Island Discs, he confessed to shouting at staff. “Shouting creates energy,” he said. “Energy creates great headlines.”
He still shouts, but in recent years, as an insider reported, “He’s no longer the expletive volcano he once was; his barbs these days tend to concern the brainpower of his target and their supposed laziness.”
He owns three properties: a home with a mile-long drive in West Sussex (known to Mail staff as Dacre Towers), a more modest weekday residence in the central London district of Belgravia and a seven-bedroom house in Scotland with a 17,000-acre shooting estate. He is a member of the Garrick Club, and sometimes takes columnists to lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair, which one recipient of his hospitality described as “very decorous, the sort of place you could have gone to in the 19th century”. He sent both of his sons to Eton.
There are no stories of past or present indiscretions involving women, alcohol or drugs. Jon Holmes, a contemporary at Leeds University who is now a sports agent, recalls him as “a very cold fish; he never, ever, seemed to go out in a group for a drink or a meal or anything”. A former Mail reporter says: “We’d all be in the Harrow [a Fleet Street pub, heavily frequented by Mail journalists], and he would come in, buy a half-pint, take it to the opposite end of the bar, drink alone, and leave without speaking.”
He has an apparently stable and successful marriage to a woman he met at university, which has lasted 37 years. He frequently attends Church of England services, but is not a believer. He likes and sometimes goes out to rugby union matches, the opera and theatre – the last partly because his wife, Kathleen Dacre, is a professor of theatre studies and partly because he has a son who is a successful director and producer with surprisingly avant-garde leanings. Asked what television he watched, he once mentioned Midsomer Murders and nothing else.
He mostly eschews the trappings and opportunities of wealth and power. It is impossible to imagine him as a member of the Chipping Norton set or anything like it. He rarely dines or lunches with the powerful or fashionable, nor does he attend glitzy parties and social events. Frequently, he lunches in his office on meat and two veg. Sometimes he will lunch with politicians, but he has little respect or liking for them as a class and thinks it wise to keep his distance; Oborne recalls how, one evening, he ignored at least five increasingly urgent requests to take a call from a senior Tory minister. He declines nearly all invitations to sit on committees; his chairmanship of an official inquiry into the “30-year rule” (under which Whitehall records were kept secret for three decades) was unusual. “Editorship is not for him a route to something else,” says a former employee.

Dacre was born and spent much of his childhood in Enfield, an unremarkable middle-class suburb of north London whose inhabitants, he told the New Yorker, “were frugal, reticent, utterly self-reliant and immensely aspirational . . . suspicious of progressive values, vulgarity of any kind, self-indulgence, pretentiousness and people who know best”. Though his parents divorced late in life, his family was then (at least in his eyes) stable, happy and secure.
But the more important clue to him and his relationship with the Mail’s Middle England readership is the Sunday Express of the 1950s and 1960s under the editorship of John Gordon and then John Junor. “That paper,” Dacre told the Society of Editors, “was my journalistic primer . . . [It] was warm, aspirational, unashamedly traditional, dedicated to decency, middlebrow, beautifully written and subbed, accessible, and, above all, utterly relevant to the lives of its readers.” Talking to Hagerty, he described Junor’s Sunday Express as “one of the great papers of all time”.
After leaving school in Yorkshire at 16, his father, Peter Dacre, joined the Sunday Express at 21 and stayed there for the rest of his working life – mainly as a show-business writer but also, for short periods, as New York correspondent and foreign editor. Each Sunday that week’s paper was discussed and analysed over the Dacre family dinner table.
It was then in its heyday, selling five million copies a week, and it didn’t go into severe decline (it now sells under 440,000) until the 1980s. It was a formulaic paper, which placed the same types of stories and features in exactly the same spots week after week. As Roy Greenslade observes in Press Gang, his post-1944 history of national newspapers, it was “virtually devoid of genuine news”; what it presented as news stories were really quirky mini-features, starting, as Greenslade put it, “with lengthy scene-setting descriptions or homilies”. Its staple subjects were animals, motor cars and wartime heroes. Its biggest target was “filth”, in the theatre, the cinema, books, magazines and TV programmes.
It particularly deplored any assault on the delicate sensibilities of children. Dacre’s father criticised the BBC in 1965 for the unsuitable content of its Sunday teatime serials. Lorna Doone, he wrote, ended “gruesomely”, with a man drowning in a bog, and in the first episode of a spy serial the actors used such expressions as “damn”, “hell” and “silly bitch” at a time supposedly reserved for “family viewing”. “Have the men responsible for these programmes,” asked the elder Dacre, “forgotten that there can be no family without children? What kind of men are they? Do they have families of their own?” Another piece denounced the BBC’s Sunday evening play for “an overdose of twisted social conscience”.
The young Dacre was hooked by newspapers. He only ever wanted to be a journalist and he always had his eyes on editing: “I’m a good writer, but not a great writer,” he told Hagerty. As a child in New York, during his father’s posting there, he would wake to the clattering of the ticker-tape telex machine outside his bedroom. In school holidays, he worked as a messenger for Junor’s Sunday Express and then spent a gap year before university as a trainee on the Daily Express. At the fee-charging University College School in Hampstead, north London, he edited the school magazine, and once ran, he told the Society of Editors, “a ponderous, prolix and achingly dull” special issue about the evangelist Billy Graham. It “went down like a sodden hot cross bus”, teaching him the essential lesson, which the Mail remembers every day on every page, that the worst sin in journalism is to be boring.
To his disappointment, his application to Oxford University failed. He went instead to Leeds, where he read English and edited Union News, taking it sharply downmarket from, in his own description, “a product that looked like the then Times on Prozac” to one that ran “Leeds Lovelies” on page three. It won an award for student newspaper of the year. The paper supported a sit-in (led by the union president, Jack Straw, later a Labour cabinet minister), interviewed a student about “the delights of getting stoned”, wrote sympathetically about gay people, immigrants and homeless families, and called on students to help in “breaking down the barriers between the coloured and white communities of this town”. At the time, he subsequently claimed, he was left-wing, though Jon Holmes, who worked on Dacre’s Union News, says: “I never heard him express a political view except in favour of planned economies for third-world, though not first-world, countries.”
His left-wing period, as he calls it, continued until the Daily Express, which he joined as soon as he left Leeds, sent him to America in 1976. He stayed there for six years, latterly working for the Mail. “America,” Dacre told Hagerty, “taught me the power of the free market . . . to improve the lives of the vast majority of ordinary people.”
The Mail brought him back to London in the early 1980s and made him news editor. According to various accounts, he would “rampage through the newsroom with arms flailing like a windmill”, shouting “Go, paras, go” as he despatched reporters on stories. He climbed the hierarchy until in 1991 he became the editor of the London Evening Standard, then owned, like the Mail, by the Rothermeres’ Associated Newspapers. Circulation rose by 25 per cent in 16 months and Rupert Murdoch sounded him out about the Times editorship. To stop him leaving, the Mail editor David English resigned his chair, recommended that Dacre should replace him, and moved “upstairs” as editor-in-chief, another title that Dacre eventually inherited after English died in 1998.
Dacre’s editorship has been more successful than his mentor’s but most staff do not love him as they did English. English, though capable of great coldness to those who fell into disfavour and no less likely to fly off the handle, had charm and charisma. “He would be delighted when you rang,” a former foreign correspondent says, “and he’d want to gossip and know about everything that was going on. Sometimes we’d talk for an hour. But Paul doesn’t give good phone.”
He will invite writers into his office, push a glass of champagne into their hands and start saying their latest story is rubbish even as he does so. “And you hardly got time to finish the bloody drink,” a former reporter complains. A former executive says: “His track record for creating columnists is nil. He buys them up from elsewhere. He doesn’t home-grow talent because he doesn’t nurture and praise it. That’s where he’s unlike English.”
Dacre is a passionate and emotional man. Though the story that he sometimes sheds tears as he dictates leaders is probably apocryphal, nobody who has worked with him doubts that he is sincere in the views he and the Mail express. “He’s not an editor who wakes up in the morning and wonders what he should be thinking today,” says Simon Heffer, a Mail columnist. Another columnist, Amanda Platell, a former editor of the Sunday Mirror and press secretary to William Hague during his leadership of the Conservative Party, says: “When I was an editor, I had to second-guess my readership because they weren’t my natural constituency. Paul never has to do that.”
But while his views are mostly right-wing, he is not a reliable ally for the Conservative Party, or for anyone else. This aspect of his way of working is little understood. More than most editors, it can be said of him that he is in nobody’s pocket, not even his proprietor’s. He inherited from English a paper that was slavishly pro-Tory (“David was always in and out of No 10,” said a long-serving Mail editor), firmly pro-Europe and read mainly by people in London and the south-east. Dacre changed the politics of the paper and the demographics of its audience. Today, it is resolutely – some would say hysterically – Euro­sceptic and a far higher proportion of its readership is from Scotland and the English north and midlands. The Mail has ceased to take its line from Tory headquarters or to act as a mouthpiece for Conservative leaders. Indeed, every Tory leader since Margaret That­cher has fallen short of Dacre’s exacting standards. That applies particularly to John Major and David Cameron. According to a former columnist, Dacre regards the latter as “brash, shallow, unthinking and self-advancing” and he takes an equally jaundiced view of Boris Johnson. Twice he backed Kenneth Clarke for the party leadership, despite Clarke’s enthusiasm for the EU.
Clarke is a model for the politicians Dacre generally favours even if he disagrees with most of what they say: earthy, authentic, unpretentious, consistent in their values. Jack Straw and David Blunkett – both, like Clarke, from humble backgrounds – are other examples. For a time, Dacre took a relatively kindly view of Tony Blair, having been impressed by the future prime minister’s “tough on crime” approach as shadow home secretary. But he was always suspicious of Blair’s socially liberal views on marriage, gays and drugs and he told Hagerty that once Labour attained power, he saw the new government as “manipulative, dictatorial and slightly corrupt”. He wished, he added, that Blair had “done as much for the family as he’s done for gay rights”.
Gordon Brown, however, was smiled upon as no other politician had ever been. The two men developed a strange friendship, involving meals together and walks in the park, which one Mail columnist described to me as “the attraction of the two weirdest boys in the playground”. Brown, Dacre told Hagerty, was “touched by the mantle of greatness . . . he is a genuinely good man . . . a compassionate man . . . an original thinker . . . of enormous willpower and courage”. At a Savoy Hotel event to celebrate Dacre’s first ten years as editor, Brown was almost equally effusive, describing the Mail editor as showing “great personal warmth and kindness . . . as well as great journalistic skill”. “We tried to tell Dacre,” says a former Mail political reporter, “that Brown was not a very good chancellor and the economy would implode eventually. But frankly, Dacre has poor political judgement. They were united by a mutual hatred of Blair. Both are social conservatives; they’re both suspicious of foreigners; they both have a kind of Presbyterian morality. Dacre would say that Brown believes in work. It’s typical of him that he seizes on a single word as the key to his understanding of someone else.”
It is inconceivable that the Mail would ever back a party other than the Conservatives in a general election, but Dacre’s support can be cool, as it was in 1997 and 2010. Although he described himself to Hagerty as “a Thatcher­ite politically” and though self-made entrepreneurs are among the few people who can expect favourable coverage in the Mail, Dacre is, to most neoliberals, a tepid and inconsistent supporter of free enterprise. Nor is he a neocon. The Mail opposed overseas military interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria. It has denounced Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and torture. It may be hard on immigrants and benefit scroungers, but it is often equally hard on the rich and famous, pursuing overpaid bosses of public-service utilities to their luxurious homes, exposing “depravity” among the well-heeled and high-born, and rarely treating TV and film celebrities with the deference that is the staple fare of other tabloids.
Many Mail campaigns have centred on liberal or environmental causes: lead in petrol, plastic bags, secret justice, the extradition to the United States of the hacker Gary McKinnon, and so on. For a time, the Mail furiously campaigned to stop Labour deporting failed (black) asylum-seekers to Zimbabwe, even though, almost simultaneously, it was berating ministers for allowing too many illegal immigrants to stay. Other campaigns, such as those against internet porn and super-casinos (both of which influenced government action), though reflecting the Mail’s conservative social agenda, highlighted issues that concern many on the left.
Dacre’s most celebrated campaign, which even some of his enemies regard as his finest hour, was to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. In 1997, over the five photographs of those he believed were responsible, he ran the headline “MURDERERS” and, beneath it, asserted: “The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us”.
It was hugely courageous, but did it exonerate the Mail from accusations of racism? Critics point out that the paper rarely features black people except as criminals, though this is not exceptional for the nationals. The “soft” features on women, fashion, style and health are illustrated almost entirely by white faces and bodies.

Dacre’s somewhat belated support for the Lawrence campaign was prompted by a personal connection: Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s father, had worked as a decorator on Dacre’s London house of the time, in Islington. The Mail’s campaign, critics argue, was based on substituting one frame of prejudice for another. Young Stephen eschewed gangs and drugs, did his homework and wanted to go to university. His parents were married, aspirational and home-owning. In everything except skin colour, the Law­rence family represented Middle England, while his white alleged killers were low-class yobs who threatened the safety of all res­pectable folk.
In that, as in much else, Dacre’s Mail recalls 1950s Britain, which rather patronisingly welcomed migrants from Asia and the Caribbean as long as they behaved as though they and their ancestors were English. “If you’re in twinset and pearls, your colour is irrelevant,” says a former Mail journalist. “And Dacre’s attitude to gays changed when he realised it’s possible to be an extremely boring gay person.”
The Mail’s attitudes to drugs are also redolent of the 1950s. Writing about the disgraced Co-operative Bank chairman Paul Flowers, Stephen Glover – the Mail columnist whose views, according to insiders, track Dacre’s most closely – criticised commentators who “concentrated on his financial unsuitability”, placing “relatively little emphasis” on his “moral turpitude”.
Most of all, the Mail seems determined to uphold the 1950s ideal of womanhood: the stay-at-home mother who dedicates herself to homemaking and prepares a cooked dinner for her husband on his return home every night. That, the paper’s defenders say, is something of a caricature of the Mail’s position. It objects not so much to working mothers as to middle-class feminists who insist that women can “have it all”. English aimed at turning the Mail into “the women’s paper”, and succeeded: it became the only national newspaper where women accounted for more than half the readership. That remains true, and yet Dacre sometimes seems determined to drive them away. The paper subjects women’s bodies, clothes and deportment to relentless and detailed scrutiny, and often finds them wanting, particularly in the thigh and bottom department. It gives prominent coverage to research that warns of the negative effects of working mothers on children’s lives.
The Mail’s poster girl is Liz Jones, the columnist and fashion editor celebrated for her self-hatred and misery. “She has so much,” says another Mail journalist, “lots of money, expensive houses, the newest clothes. But she’s never had a child, she hasn’t kept hold of a man, and she’s unhappy. The message is: it’s what happens to you, girls, if you pursue worldly success. You can succeed but, oh boy, you will suffer for it.”
The Mail’s punishing hours, requiring news and features executives to stay at the office until late into the evening (not uncommon in national newspapers), and its largely unsympathetic attitude to part-time employment make it an unfriendly environment for working mothers. When Dacre took over at the Mail, he immediately appointed a female deputy, which, said another woman who then had a senior role in the group, “was quite a statement”. But the paper now has few women in its most senior positions, other than the editor of Femail (though sometimes even that post is occupied by a man), and few staff have young children.
Yet in some respects, the Mail, even though it does not recognise the National Union of Journalists, is a good employer. Unlike the Mirror, it is not under a company ruled by accountants who single-mindedly seek “efficiencies”. Unlike the Times and the Sun, it does not have a proprietor who touts his papers’ support to the highest bidder. Unlike the Guardian and Independent, it is not beset by financial problems. The pro­prietor, Viscount (Jonathan) Rothermere, whose great-grandfather Harold Harms­worth founded the paper with his brother Alfred in 1896, allows his editors wide freedom, as did his father, Vere Rothermere, who appointed Dacre. The Mail, alone among national newspapers, has had no significant rounds of editorial redundancies in recent years and its staffing levels (it employs about 400 journalists) are comparable to what they were a decade ago.
Dacre’s paper is his sole domain; MailOnline is run separately (though Dacre, as editor-in-chief, has oversight) and although the website carries all daily and Sunday paper stories, much of its content is self-generated and the editorial flavour is distinct. Dacre demands, and mostly gets, a generous budget, paying high salaries for established editorial staff and columnists and high fees for freelance contributors. Journalists are driven hard but, at senior levels in particular, they rarely leave, not least because Dacre is as loyal to them as they mostly are to him. Outright sackings are rare and nearly always accompanied by large payoffs.
Those who do leave often reach the top elsewhere. The current editors of both Telegraph papers – Tony Gallagher at the daily and Ian MacGregor at the Sunday – are former Mail executives.
Despite more than two decades at the helm, Dacre shows few signs of slowing down. After heart trouble some years ago – which caused an absence of several months from the office – his holidays, which he usually takes in the British Virgin Islands, have become slightly longer and more frequent. But he still routinely puts in 14-hour days.
Nevertheless, speculation about his future has grown among journalists on the Mail and other papers. At the end of November, Dacre sold his last remaining shares in the Daily Mail and General Trust, the Mail’s parent company, for £347,564; he disposed of the majority in 2012. His latest contract, signed on his 65th birthday, is for one year only. Geordie Greig, the 53-year-old editor of the Mail on Sunday, is widely regarded as the most likely successor, though Martin Clarke, the abrasive publisher of the phenomenally successful MailOnline, now the most visited newspaper website in the world, is also tipped and Jon Steafel, Dacre’s deputy, is favoured by most staff. The surprising announcement in November that Richard Kay, the paper’s diarist and a long-standing friend of Dacre’s, is to leave his position looks like another straw in the wind, particularly given that his almost certain replacement is Sebastian Shakespeare, previously the diary editor at the London Evening Standard, where Greig was editor before he moved to the Mail on Sunday.
Fleet Street rumour has it that Kay is being moved because he upset friends of Lady Rothermere, the proprietor’s wife, and that she is also behind the abrupt departure of the columnist Melanie Phillips, apparently on the grounds that her style – particularly during a June appearance on BBC1’s Question Time – is too shrill. Lady Rothermere, it is said, is desperately keen to oust Dacre in favour of Greig. Senior Mail sources pooh-pooh such tales, but they stop short of outright denials that Dacre is nearing the end of his days on the paper.

Period: 1230.14 days

	Submissions	Comments
Total	999	113268
Rate (per day)	0.81	92.01
Unique Redditors	592	21538
Combined Score	638013	1982883

Top Submitters' Top Submissions

1. 21393 points, 27 submissions: days-of-candy
   
   1. [FRESH] Fleet Foxes - Third of May / Ōdaigahara (2437 points, 430 comments)
   2. Father John Misty's new album God's Favorite Customer officially out June 1 (1640 points, 231 comments)
   3. [FRESH ALBUM] Beach House - 7 (1536 points, 304 comments)
   4. New Arcade Fire album called Everything Now, out July 28 (1217 points, 179 comments)
   5. American Football Announce First New Album in 17 Years, Share New Song (1031 points, 181 comments)
   6. New Mitski album Be the Cowboy out August 17 (924 points, 59 comments)
   7. [FRESH] Courtney Barnett - Nameless, Faceless (873 points, 134 comments)
   8. New St. Vincent album Masseduction out on October 13th (838 points, 138 comments)
   9. [FRESH] Alvvays - In Undertow (838 points, 118 comments)
   10. [FRESH] Real Estate - Darling (818 points, 135 comments)
2. 12072 points, 20 submissions: ReconEG
   
   1. R.I.P. Charles Bradley, legendary soul singer has died 68 (1352 points, 79 comments)
   2. Jeff Goldblum Announces Debut Album (1025 points, 57 comments)
   3. [FRESH VIDEO] John Cena - Where Is My Mind? (Pixies Cover) (962 points, 51 comments)
   4. Rock 'n Roll legend Chuck Berry has died (765 points, 79 comments)
   5. James Blake Speaks Out on Managing 'Suicidal Thoughts' & Staying Healthy on the Road (722 points, 61 comments)
   6. Blood Orange announces new album, Negro Swan, for release on 8/24 (682 points, 63 comments)
   7. Preoccupations just hit their goal for their gear recovery GoFundMe! (665 points, 16 comments)
   8. Tom Petty Hospitalized After Cardiac Arrest: Report (635 points, 83 comments)
   9. Preoccupations started a GoFundMe to replace their stolen gear (614 points, 50 comments)
   10. Bon Iver’s Manager Kyle Frenette Running for Congress (503 points, 24 comments)
3. 10457 points, 15 submissions: giraffeking
   
   1. Alvvays - Antisocialites wins Alternative Album of the Year at the 2018 Junos (1360 points, 77 comments)
   2. Tame Impala, Damon Albarn, Thundercat, BADBADNOTGOOD & Steve Lacy among collaborators on Kali Uchis’ New Album (1200 points, 78 comments)
   3. Courtney Barnett Is Nearly Done With New LP (1081 points, 52 comments)
   4. Fader Removes thatistheplan Article Amid Settlement With Anthony Fantano (977 points, 415 comments)
   5. Howard Stern Announces David Bowie Tribute Special Featuring Car Seat Headrest, Britt Daniel, Sun Kil Moon, Michael Penn & Aimee Mann, & More (752 points, 51 comments)
   6. Grimes teases new music soon on Twitter (747 points, 66 comments)
   7. [FRESH] Animal Collective - Hair Cutter (631 points, 140 comments)
   8. Happy 20th Birthday to Björk's Homogenic (563 points, 75 comments)
   9. [FRESH STREAM] James Blake - The Color in Anything (543 points, 226 comments)
   10. [FRESH VIDEO] Sufjan Stevens - Mystery of Love (490 points, 70 comments)
4. 8606 points, 14 submissions: ElitistHatPropaganda
   
   1. Radiohead to unleash new single “I Promise” on Friday (853 points, 52 comments)
   2. Radiohead and Hans Zimmer are creating a track together for 'Blue Planet' (822 points, 48 comments)
   3. OK Computer is 20 today! (773 points, 126 comments)
   4. Bob Dylan wins Nobel Literature Prize (742 points, 204 comments)
   5. Happy 50th Birthday Björk! (726 points, 63 comments)
   6. Bob Dylan accused of plagiarising his Nobel speech from SparkNotes (614 points, 73 comments)
   7. Wayne Coyne Announces New Flaming Lips/Mac DeMarco Split EP (614 points, 49 comments)
   8. Thom Yorke Chills With BB-8 at Star Wars Premiere (582 points, 56 comments)
   9. Chvrches dedicate song to Harambe during Reading festival slot (563 points, 115 comments)
   10. So Angel Olsen may be releasing an "new album", Phases, on November 10th. (515 points, 36 comments)
5. 7891 points, 14 submissions: gratisninja_
   
   1. Spotify 2017 Review: Your 2017 Wrapped (963 points, 649 comments)
   2. [FRESH VIDEO] MGMT - Little Dark Age (928 points, 164 comments)
   3. Grammys 2018: LCD Soundsystem Win Best Dance Recording (827 points, 40 comments)
   4. Spotify Adds Songwriter and Producer Credits (663 points, 32 comments)
   5. Grimes Plans “Highly Collaborative” Final Album For Her “Shit Label” (661 points, 109 comments)
   6. [FRESH] Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Not In Love We're Just High (503 points, 53 comments)
   7. [FRESH] Radiohead - The Numbers: Jonny, Thom & a CR78 (479 points, 69 comments)
   8. [FRESH] Radiohead - I Promise (451 points, 56 comments)
   9. Jeff Rosenstock's opening and end credits songs for cartoon Craig of the Creek (435 points, 28 comments)
   10. Young Fathers removed from German festival for supporting pro-Palestine movement BDS (432 points, 138 comments)
6. 6742 points, 6 submissions: Stauce52
   
   1. Sir Paul McCartney warns that the “future of music is in danger... Without the grassroots clubs, pubs and music venues my career could have been very different.” He is backing a new campaign which is seeking to curb the rising number of music venue closures (2248 points, 181 comments)
   2. FOX News: Radiohead’s music “is just elaborate moaning and whining for ring tone sounds” (1833 points, 317 comments)
   3. Daniel Craig Took The Cast Of Logan Lucky To See Car Seat Headrest (880 points, 82 comments)
   4. 13 Reasons Why Soundtrack Artist Car Seat Headrest Criticizes Show For Glorifying Suicide: "writers: please don't tell kids how to turn their miserable and hopeless lives into a thrilling and cathartic suicide mission" (764 points, 206 comments)
   5. Justin Vernon On Bruno Mars’ Grammy Win: “You Absolutely Have To Be Shitting Me” (560 points, 131 comments)
   6. Andre 3000 is working with Kid Cudi and Kaytranada (457 points, 53 comments)
7. 6712 points, 8 submissions: 11thhourblues
   
   1. If the web loses net neutrality, independent musicians will lose their careers. (2046 points, 203 comments)
   2. James Murphy Says David Bowie Convinced Him To Get LCD Soundsystem Back Together (1006 points, 89 comments)
   3. [SPECULATION] Father John Misty's next record is titled 'God's Favorite Customer' and available June 1st (809 points, 126 comments)
   4. Father John Misty Finally Denounces Music Blogging (635 points, 110 comments)
   5. [FRESH] Car Seat Headrest - Beach Life-In-Death (606 points, 116 comments)
   6. "Stranger Things"' Finn Wolfhard Wants to Release an Album, Loves Joy Division (604 points, 76 comments)
   7. [FRESH] Pinegrove - Intrepid (589 points, 167 comments)
   8. Win Butler Sings Arcade Fire At LA Karaoke Bar (417 points, 48 comments)
8. 6125 points, 9 submissions: Alonissos
   
   1. Mac DeMarco met Tom Hanks while wearing a t-shirt with their faces on (1229 points, 38 comments)
   2. Bjork reveals secret collaboration with Wu-Tang Clan (1085 points, 40 comments)
   3. Passion Pit are going on tour because Michael Angelakos needs money for mental health treatments (895 points, 101 comments)
   4. Liam Gallagher: "My only regret is that Noel became a dickhead" (734 points, 114 comments)
   5. Music venue apologises to Alvvays singer Molly Rankin after man attempted to forcefully kiss her (558 points, 194 comments)
   6. The National already have another album's worth of new material written (453 points, 61 comments)
   7. New Leonard Cohen poetry book (completed days before his death) set to be released (424 points, 11 comments)
   8. The great Leonard Cohen died one year ago today, here's my favourite performance (382 points, 26 comments)
   9. Morrissey: "That was the last interview I will ever do” (365 points, 83 comments)
9. 5439 points, 7 submissions: Orenseg
   
   1. [FRESH ALBUM] Arctic Monkeys - Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (1797 points, 526 comments)
   2. [FRESH ALBUM] Death Grips - Year Of The Snitch (1050 points, 225 comments)
   3. [FRESH ALBUM] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Sketches of Brunswick East (720 points, 148 comments)
   4. [FRESH ALBUM] Jon Hopkins - Singularity (569 points, 101 comments)
   5. Massive Attack don't show up at Mad Cool festival, keep fans waiting for 90+ minutes until an official cancellation (526 points, 84 comments)
   6. [FRESH ALBUM] Melody's Echo Chamber - Bon Voyage (425 points, 72 comments)
   7. Caribou seems to be teasing new material (352 points, 34 comments)
10. 5354 points, 10 submissions: utdeo
    
    1. Grimes Gets Restraining Order on Strange Man Wearing Cape in Her Backyard (855 points, 91 comments)
    2. Jóhann Jóhannsson Dead At 48 (736 points, 58 comments)
    3. Mac Demarco on This Old Dog leaking (582 points, 108 comments)
    4. Melody's Echo Chamber teases return (547 points, 34 comments)
    5. Rivers Cuomo responds to recent criticism (484 points, 112 comments)
    6. Walter Becker of Steely Dan has died (474 points, 55 comments)
    7. Arcade Fire Played the Title Track to “Neon Bible” for the First Time in Eight Years at Primavera (461 points, 101 comments)
    8. Massive Attack's ‘Mezzanine’ Turns 20 (444 points, 32 comments)
    9. New Death Cab for Cutie album Thank You for Today out August 17 (405 points, 50 comments)
    10. Don’t Cry for Mitski (366 points, 46 comments)
11. 5191 points, 7 submissions: ChicksofRoosters
    
    1. [Fresh] Father John Misty - Pure Comedy (1047 points, 200 comments)
    2. LCD Soundsystem Announces Two New Songs Coming Tonight (944 points, 109 comments)
    3. Coachella Lineup 2017 (889 points, 466 comments)
    4. Homecoming Music Festival Lineup (829 points, 113 comments)
    5. Lollapalooza 2017 Lineup (648 points, 324 comments)
    6. Austin City Limits Lineup 2018 (428 points, 109 comments)
    7. Shaky Knees Lineup 2018 (406 points, 112 comments)
12. 4516 points, 6 submissions: HolyFad
    
    1. Happy 5th birthday to Tame Impala’s Lonerism! (2037 points, 207 comments)
    2. [FRESH ALBUM] King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Gumboot Soup (697 points, 77 comments)
    3. [FRESH VIDEO] Beach House - 7 (616 points, 57 comments)
    4. New Gorillaz song will be premiering tomorrow on BBC Radio 1 (400 points, 45 comments)
    5. An update on Melody Prochet (392 points, 31 comments)
    6. Alex Turner confirms new Arctic Monkeys album (374 points, 89 comments)
13. 4335 points, 7 submissions: gymnol7412
    
    1. [FRESH] Mitski - Nobody (966 points, 99 comments)
    2. [FRESH VIDEO] Radiohead - Man of War (904 points, 120 comments)
    3. The new Radiohead album will be out in June, according to the band's manager (624 points, 147 comments)
    4. David Bowie's Blackstar has won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album (522 points, 102 comments)
    5. Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool will finally come to Spotify on June 17th (511 points, 109 comments)
    6. The Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat turns 50 today! (443 points, 24 comments)
    7. Album of the Year 2016 #26: Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool (365 points, 79 comments)
14. 4005 points, 4 submissions: DoctorDoc247
    
    1. [FRESH] MGMT - Little Dark Age (1598 points, 340 comments)
    2. [FRESH] LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - AMERICAN DREAM (1220 points, 477 comments)
    3. [FRESH] Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (720 points, 234 comments)
    4. [FRESH ALBUM] - James McAlister, Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly- Planetarium (467 points, 86 comments)
15. 3929 points, 6 submissions: liam-hopkins
    
    1. Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut turns 10 today!) (1504 points, 175 comments)
    2. [FRESH VIDEO] Car Seat Headrest - "Nervous Young Inhumans" (679 points, 144 comments)
    3. [FRESH COVER] Smash Mouth - Something Soon (Originally by Car Seat Headrest) (606 points, 91 comments)
    4. [FRESH VIDEO] Superorganism - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) (412 points, 157 comments)
    5. [FRESH ALBUM] Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me (370 points, 75 comments)
    6. James Murphy wanted a spoken word outro by Leonard Cohen on LCDSoundsystem’s new album (358 points, 67 comments)
16. 3877 points, 5 submissions: OlafdePolaf
    
    1. Sufjan Stevens - Mystery of Love nominated for an Academy Award for Original Song. (1604 points, 153 comments)
    2. LCD Soundsystem’s Gavin Russom Comes Out as Transgender (1083 points, 277 comments)
    3. Mount Eerie Announces Double-Vinyl Live Album 'After' (436 points, 125 comments)
    4. The Quietus' Albums Of The Year 2017 (383 points, 185 comments)
    5. [FRESH] Mount Eerie - Ravens (371 points, 58 comments)
17. 3722 points, 8 submissions: tcoogan15
    
    1. [FRESH STREAM] SOPHIE - OIL OF EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES (605 points, 126 comments)
    2. M83 'Saturdays = Youth' Turns 10 (566 points, 74 comments)
    3. LCD Soundsystem, A Tribe Called Quest, Solange Headlining 2017 Pitchfork Music Festival (521 points, 134 comments)
    4. [FRESH PERFORMANCE] Japanese Breakfast - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) (460 points, 47 comments)
    5. A New Gorillaz Album Is Coming Next Year (423 points, 129 comments)
    6. [FRESH VIDEO] LCD Soundsystem - Call the Police (SNL) (403 points, 60 comments)
    7. The Needle Drop's Top 50 Albums of 2016 (374 points, 227 comments)
    8. [FRESH] Animal Collective - Man of Oil (370 points, 64 comments)
18. 3672 points, 5 submissions: felonydumper
    
    1. Mac DeMarco brought out Post Malone to play egg shaker at a show in Japan (1116 points, 76 comments)
    2. Lil Ugly Mane reveals he used to be a heroin addict and says he regrets making the song Lean Got Me Fucked Up because it's "irresponsible and fucking lame" (906 points, 97 comments)
    3. [FRESH VIDEO] Charli XCX - Boys (featuring appearances by Mac DeMarco, Vampire Weekend, Kaytranada, Joe Jonas, DRAM, Denzel Curry, Joey Bada$$, Aminé, Riz Ahmed, Jack Antonoff, Mark Ronson, and more) (643 points, 138 comments)
    4. I think a misinformed reddit post I made caused Pitchfork to write a stupidly inaccurate article (554 points, 79 comments)
    5. Let me tell you about this mind-blowing experimental rock band I just saw called 'Palm' (453 points, 104 comments)
19. 3519 points, 1 submission: Epsilon76
    
    1. David Bowie's official site: "David Bowie died peacefully today... after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer" (3519 points, 341 comments)
20. 3390 points, 4 submissions: Alistair3900
    
    1. [Fresh] Gorillaz - Humility (1463 points, 167 comments)
    2. [Fresh Album] The National - Sleep Well Beast (864 points, 398 comments)
    3. [Fresh Album] Arcade Fire - Everything Now (637 points, 655 comments)
    4. [Fresh Album] Queens of the Stone Age - Villains (426 points, 155 comments)

Top Commenters

1. who_is_mgmt (20078 points, 186 comments)
2. Yoooooouuuuuuuu (12836 points, 518 comments)
3. realmacbriare (12349 points, 165 comments)
4. OxBakersTriumph (10804 points, 231 comments)
5. tedcruzcontrol (10664 points, 167 comments)
6. jbrav88 (10604 points, 119 comments)
7. AnionMilkHotel (10307 points, 84 comments)
8. Ervin_Pepper (9892 points, 134 comments)
9. god_is_ender (9372 points, 145 comments)
10. FyuuR (9290 points, 384 comments)
11. GeorgeTaylorG (8900 points, 292 comments)
12. PhilElverum (7776 points, 115 comments)
13. sara520 (7223 points, 314 comments)
14. Robinnoelpecknold (7217 points, 164 comments)
15. art36 (7089 points, 369 comments)
16. ElitistHatPropaganda (7017 points, 162 comments)
17. mau5head15 (6764 points, 202 comments)
18. InSearchOfGoodPun (6617 points, 234 comments)
19. number90901 (6471 points, 346 comments)
20. cjdennis29 (6346 points, 313 comments)

Top Submissions

1. David Bowie's official site: "David Bowie died peacefully today... after a courageous 18 month battle with cancer" by Epsilon76 (3519 points, 341 comments)
2. Neutral Milk Hotel's 'In The Aeroplane Over The Sea' Turns 20 by lifeinaglasshouse (2988 points, 357 comments)
3. Leonard Cohen Passed Away by two_bagels_please (2475 points, 220 comments)
4. [FRESH] Fleet Foxes - Third of May / Ōdaigahara by days-of-candy (2437 points, 430 comments)
5. [FRESH PSA] Support Net Neutrality or Comcast will charge you an extra $10 a month to look at Sufjan Stevens pictures by John_Lawn4 (2428 points, 57 comments)
6. Hey it's MGMT, ask us anything! by who_is_mgmt (2362 points, 2265 comments)
7. The Gorillaz announce that "The gang is back" by BIGxM1KE (2322 points, 54 comments)
8. Sir Paul McCartney warns that the “future of music is in danger... Without the grassroots clubs, pubs and music venues my career could have been very different.” He is backing a new campaign which is seeking to curb the rising number of music venue closures by Stauce52 (2248 points, 181 comments)
9. Sufjan is performing at the oscars! by gnod69 (2052 points, 152 comments)
10. If the web loses net neutrality, independent musicians will lose their careers. by 11thhourblues (2046 points, 203 comments)

Top Comments

1. 1413 points: TheKaraokeSinger's comment in Grimes Gets Restraining Order on Strange Man Wearing Cape in Her Backyard
2. 1175 points: deleted's comment in FOX News: Radiohead’s music “is just elaborate moaning and whining for ring tone sounds”
3. 1058 points: TheOppositeOfDecent's comment in /indieheads Roast of: Arctic Monkeys
4. 1049 points: FuckingTeemo's comment in [FRESH] LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - AMERICAN DREAM
5. 1037 points: Futhermucker's comment in We did it!
6. 988 points: ElitistHatPropaganda's comment in Arcade Fire looks for signs of life on North American tour as venues go unfilled
7. 918 points: Joe_Henshell's comment in /indieheads Roast of: Arctic Monkeys
8. 911 points: The_Shiva_Bowl's comment in Grimes says she's legally changing her name to "c"
9. 878 points: snidelaughter's comment in Pitchfork: The 50 Best Albums of 2017
10. 874 points: ParanoidAndroid93's comment in [DISCUSSION] /indieheads Roast of: Anthony Fantano

Generated with BBoe's Subreddit Stats

Hey guys, I recently stumbled upon a basically new Epiphone Elitist Casino body/neck stripped of all of it's hardware for a really dumb low price of $300. I've always wanted one of these so I snatched it up. Not my first rebuild, won't be my last I'm sure.
The only part I am having difficulty deciding on/sourcing are the pickups. I have played both an Elitist and one of the LTD John Lennon 1965's and those Gibson USA P90's sounded very cool. I'm not looking for the most aggressive tone of all time, but I also want plenty of mid-range and umph (not necessarily vintage). I can't seem to find a source fo the Gibson USA P90's anywhere. Seems like what I want are the Lollar p90's. But read on...
Due to the metric Japanese measurements plus the Epiphone/ES 330's unique cavity and top curvature, nobody seems to sell a direct aftermarket drop in. There is only one pickup set I've found that is drops-in by Kent Armstrong. I can't find a single video or review of them anywhere. Not outrageous price ($120), but too much for the risk imho. I'd never even heard of them until I started looking so I'm apprehensive.
The pickups everyone raves about either the Seymore Duncan Antiquities ($230+ for a set) or the Lollar p90's that already have my attention ($230+ for a set). Surprisingly the GFS p90 pops up a lot as being pretty great, for only $70 for the set. p90's are easy and relatively cheap to adjust as you can swap magnets in seconds, so that GFS set is tempting as hell. However none of these are direct drop in replacements. They would require drilling new holes, or shims, or both. Which I am not totally against.
As a final third option, several people offer rewinding services on p90's. I could grab a cheap ass set of the china Epiphone imports for $30 direct, and then pay somebody to rewind them properly. Lollar charges $230 for that, so it's basically the cost of a new set that I could then drop-in. I've found another indie guy that will do it for $90, to Lollar's specs. I just don't know if it's a good idea to start from such a crappy base.
Anyone have any experience or guidance for me? Thank you!
Edit* him to them

Hi, I’m looking to upgrade from my Epiphone Dot. I don’t really have any issues with the guitar, but I’d like something similar that feels less “cheap.” It’s definitely a nice guitar for the price, but I’d like one with better overall quality and feel.
I still want a semi-hollow or hollowbody and prefer Epiphone so i’ve been looking at the Casino and Sheraton.
My main question is if either of those Epiphones are much of an upgrade build-wise. The Sheraton is very similar and a couple hundred dollars more than the Dot, but is the quality better at all? I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews in that regard. Some seem to think it’s the same quality wise, but just has nicer cosmetics. I don’t want to waste my time and spend $200 more for fancier looking hardware, inlays, etc. What about the Casino? I know it’s not much, but is the quality any better for $200 more? The Elitist ’65 Casino is too expensive by the way.
It’s not really possible to try the guitars in person due to location so I’d appreciate your opinions. Thanks for any help.