Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Mumsnet and the Mail

I'm not a mother (nor a father as far as I'm aware) but I've heard of Mumsnet - a web forum devoted to parenthood which brings together mums from all walks of life. So has the Mail, which likes to harvest content from all open sources to try and drive traffic to its own site. So every week the Mail rounds up the latest from Mumsnet to shamelessly C&V the content without having to pay anything for features in its publication give an insight into what the nation's mums are talking about.

This laziness, however, hasn't gone unnoticed over at Mumsnet, where not everyone is delighted that their views are being airlifted out of their original location and parachuted down into the Mail, a publication whose views and opinions aren't always the most delightful in the world.

As one poster points out*:

The idea that some deadline journalist who can't be a*ed to come up with an original idea is going to cherry pick her way through the juiciest posts and make her selection is horrendous. What do you post on? What do you post on that WON'T be selected by an idle Daily Mail hack for mass regurgitation in her weekly column? You've no way of guessing, so you've got to muffle your identity. Or not post on the burning issues. The idea that my thoughts about my struggles with parenthood, birth, twins, PND, toddler feeding can become fodder for the cynical of middle England depresses and appalls me. Given that I can't predict which posts will be selected on a weekly basis the only recourse is to stop posting or make my posts bland and anonymous and keep to safe, generic subjects. If we all do this then maybe Mumsnet will become so bland the Daily Mail will go somewhere else to satisfy its deadlines. Now there's an idea. Hoist on its own petard!

Now some posters have come up with a creative solution to ensure their views aren't parroted by the Mail in its weekly round-up: they've started calling themselves rather interesting names. I can't quite see the Mail including comments by "DailyMailisperfectasapoopscoop", "TheDMofficeisfullofimmigrants", "TheDailyMailsuckscocksinhell", "DailyMailatemyswans" or "PaulDacreeatsbabies". Can you?

Thanks to Joanne for the tipoff!

*I appreciate the irony of me copying and pasting comments about Mumsnet in a story about posters complaining about having their posts copied and pasted over at another website. Honestly I do. But it's one of those occasions where I feel I have to do it. It's not as if I'm making a weekly column out of it, is it?

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