I actually have some experience with the Daily Hate Mail, the Saturday edition is well-established in this household due to the excellent TV guide in the Weekend supplement (looking for potential replacements for that could be a good future experiment), so there are some things I can say without even reading today's issue. While The Sun is loud and The Times is thoughtful, the Daily Mail seems more snide.
Well, the banner headline today is "DARLING BUDGET BUST-UP WITH IMF" (yes, we are back to ALL CAPS HEADLINES today), with a sub-headline of "Devastating warning on UK economy sparks furious late night row with Downing St" (which I feel the need to read in a loud and angry voice for some reason). The rest of the article seems uncontroversial, if a bit brief. Further articles show a more alarmist tone though. One tells of a thief who used Google Earth to scout out a church that he could steal lead off, with a note about how Google does not provide a way for homeowners to opt-out of the houses being visible on Google Earth, and a rebuttal from Google about how car manufacturers are not punished when their cars are used as getaway vehicles.
There's also a mention of the speed limit cuts and other changes in motoring law I saw in The Times yesterday, but with a mention of criticism this time, which I felt The Times was lacking. There's also obviously some outrage stories, like a murderer released after three years and a 10 year old boy mugged for his scooter by a 7 year old (all very nasty I'm sure, but I've lost the power to give a shit after more than a decade of seeing it day in and day out on the evening news). They also have a penchant for publishing science stories that I have a sneaking suspicion have very little science behind them (Today: Boys apparently do better in English if there are no girls in the class, and women who drink in pregnancy have trouble bonding with their babies), though the global warming denial seems to be in remission for now.
The big opinion piece today is "BRING ME MY MACHINE GUN", talking about the election of Jacob Zuma as President of South Africa, and the increasingly dire state of the nation itself. Hard to argue against anyone criticising a man who actually believes AIDS can be prevented by showering after sex, but it does seem be in rather bad taste to blame the 90 year old Nelson Mandela for not standing up and challenging the entire political establishment when he literally cannot support his own weight to begin with. There's also no message of hope whatsoever in the article, it seems the writer takes it that South Africa is completely doomed, and actually ends the piece with "all hope is gone". Yes, I feel ready to take on the world now!
Elsewhere, the Answers to Correspondents section was the best bit for me, the puzzles look quite good with a neat coffee break pullout, the comic strips are miles better than The Sun's (but Garfield is just not funny), it has horoscopes (My response: "Ugh, no"), all of the paper comes in a single 80 page section, and it cost me 50p.
Now for my final opinion. I didn't expect to like this paper, and I still don't. However I only found two instances of Labour-bashing, and the letters were angry but fairly undirected. My main criticism for today would be the opinion piece about South Africa. I've seen The Guardian do a lot of opinion pieces about bad situations, but they propose solutions, which the Mail did not. In the end I got a feeling of doom and gloom almost bad enough to put me back on the anti-depressants. But while that is bad, I expected more political pot-shots, which I didn't see much of. Were my expectations wrong? Is New Labour so bad they feel it can destroy itself now? Did I just pick the wrong day? No way to know for sure, though I may update this on Saturday, when I'll be getting another look at this.