Stop buying the Express

"I fail to see", comments Kieran216 below Roy Greenslade's excellent McCann/Express blog, "how anyone of sane mind could have such complete lack of dignity to actually perform the act of walking up to a shop counter and paying money for the Express or the Star".

S/he has a point. Here are papers that have knowingly printed stories they know to be false and that they know will be highly damaging to the McCann family. And they have done so with a grotesque cynicism and lack of respect not just for the McCanns but for their own readers. Just to take one instance from last October: on Monday 8th the paper splashed with 'Madeleine parents in the clear: new shock on DNA evidence'. Then followed this on the 9th with 'DNA puts parents in the frame' (hat tip Observer).

And it doesn't stop with the McCann's. As toxtethogrady comments on the same Greenslade blog: "Can we have front page apologies for the hundreds of made up Diana and weather stories now as well?". You could extend toxtethogrady's list to include stories about the family of Shannon Matthews, stories about climate change and, of course, stories about immigrants and immigration.

At the same time the papers' owner, Richard Desmond, continues to make phenomenal personal profits from his newspapers while cutting the number of staff. Last year, according to The Scotsman, he paid himself £40.7m, a good portion of which came from profits made by the Express and Star titles. Yet at the end of 2006 he cut 60 jobs from these titles and outsourced the whole business section of the Express to the Press Association - to save costs.

Desmond appears to be happy to print anything, true or false, to sell enough papers to make a profit. The more his papers' circulations decline the more costs he'll presumably cut until, at some stage in the next decade or so, they eventually become unprofitable to print.

Our only hope is that the people who keep putting their hand in their pocket to buy any of his papers, stop.