Hip-oh-krits and perverts

The Daily Mail: quite happy to publish risqué photos of 13-year-old girls while feigning outrage.

The word 'parody' doesn't begin to explain it. And yet this is a trick the Daily Mail has tried before: howling shock, disgust and outrage at anything raunchy or erotic while dedicating entire photo galleries to the very same stuff they bash.

Their coverage of Sachsgate last October was typical: they slated Georgina Baille as unedifying, vulgar, degrading and part of a "tawdry, exploitative business" while sporting a whole visual feast of "Meet Voluptua" (incidentally: the link still works, but it's interesting that, last January, the Mail was forced to remove the raunchy photo gallery and edited out certain words).

If you thought that was pathetic, then you haven't seen this one. Today Dacre's paper comes up with the following roaring headline:

"What ARE their mothers thinking? Girls as young as 13 parade themselves for a disturbing new beauty contest".

Disturbing, eh? So what does the 'repulsed' Mail do? They publicise it to anything between two and three million people (the paper's circulation in 2009 has been regularly in excess of 2 million) with an endless article accompanied by a series of disturbing and risqué photos of pre-pubescent girls posing as beauty queens.

So here's the big question. What's more disturbing: a) the Daily Mail making the photos effectively available to thousands of perverts, or b) the paper's incapability of grasping the sick irony of their own behaviour?