The Daily Mail has been ridiculed for celebrating the newspaper’s founder while at the same time acknowledging his “rickety private life” and “anti-Semitism”.
Robert Hardman credited Lord Northcliffe in a column to coincide with a new biography published by historian Andrew Roberts.
Quoting the media baron’s rivals, he said the Mail’s founder was the “greatest man who ever strode down Fleet Street”, ceding that great men are “seldom nice men”.
“His many critics would deplore his unflinching adoration of the British Empire, his rickety private life and his anti-semitism. Yet none could deny his achievements”, Hardman wrote.
A recent Times of Israel report found that Lord Rothermere, Northcliffe’s younger brother and successor, “made the case for Hitler” using the newspaper group’s significant reach.
Martin Pugh suggests in his history of British interwar fascism that Rothermere was “perhaps the most influential single propagandist for fascism between the wars.”
A TLE investigation came to a similar conclusion, finding Hitler had private communications with Rothermere and even gave support to Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the early 1930s.
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