John Ward Daily Mail, guardian, Paul Dacre, through a filter

Teenage yob monster stabbed defenceless teacher in eye with crack-cocaine syringe while buggering helpless nun with stolen antique Nazi emblem.

I’ve reached the conclusion that the length of Daily Mail website headlines is inversely proportional to the content below them. This morning – after many days spent investigating this hypothesis – I am able to reveal to the more discerning* Slog reader that my theory is as good as proven. Some examples chosen at random from today’s edition will, I trust, back up my claim.

How a public schoolgirl, 14, fell into the clutches of predatory gangs who forced her to become a sex slave. As always with the Mail, evil Darkies are involved: ‘Her ordeal highlights previously-aired fears that white schoolgirls are being groomed for underage sex by gangs of Asian men’. There’s no evidence given of any previously-aired anxiety so far as I can tell. However, right at the end of the piece is this gem: ‘She was removed from school for exhibiting inappropriate sexualised behaviour towards male pupils’. Well, that sounds to me like a previously aired fear, but when I was a teenager any male pupil abused in such a manner would’ve been deemed an idiot for mentioning it to anyone in authority.

Breast cancer test questioned as study finds only one life saved for every 258 women screened. What a scandal, except that this is more than the incidence of the cancer….and it cuts cancer deaths among women under 70 by 32%.

TV executive who killed wife after row over ‘burned roast beef’ locked up for 18 months… but he’ll be out by Christmas. This little gem omitted to mention that the wife had thrown five plates at him in front of witnesses immediately prior to the tragedy, and was pissed out of her mind. The judge said that, based on medical evidence, the blow struck would normally only have caused bruising. He also added that the defendant had feared for his life. (And before the harpies from Liberal Conspiracy turn up – no, I’m not defending him: I’m pointing out the difference between headline and story).

With blazing summers, wildfires in one hemisphere and a deep freeze in the other, is 2010 the year of extreme weather? To which the answer is ‘a bit’. What’s truly intriguing about this Mail classic is that the deep freeze part of the story is completely absent from the body copy.

An acquaintance asked me the other week why I was as nasty about the Guardian as I am about the Mail – as if I was breaking some unwritten rule about the necessity of taking a position: was I, he pondered, just a wet MOR chap at heart? Or was I a closet Communist Nazi?

I don’t get that kind of analysis. My only concern in all this stuff (apart from trying to show everyone how amazingly clever I am ha-ha, how abnormal is that?) is to show that we get almost everything through a filter. For all its laughable pretensions to speak for the underprivileged, the Guardian is a propaganda sheet – no better and no worse than the equally risible Dacre Mail.

* Research shows that 100% of Slog fans are discerning.