Short answer: The Daily Mail is published by DMGT (Daily Mail and General Trust) and controlled by the Harmsworth family, chaired by Jonathan Harmsworth, the 4th Viscount Rothermere. It was founded in 1896 and control has never once left the founding family — making it one of the longest continuously family-run major newspapers in the world. Is it reliable? That is a genuinely contested question — so contested that in 2017 the volunteer editors of Wikipedia formally banned it as a source. * In February 2017, after a long community debate, English Wikipedia declared the Daily Mail "generally unreliable" and prohibited citing it in most cases — the first news outlet the encyclopedia ever "deprecated" (Nieman Lab, Feb 2017). Editors pointed to a reputation for poor fact-checking, sensationalism and outright fabrication. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales later said the paper had "mastered the art of running stories that aren't true" (CNBC, May 2017). You needn't treat Wikipedia as the final judge of anything, but it is a striking data point: the world's most-used reference site decided the Mail's copy could not be trusted at face value. * The ownership is old money and tight control. DMGT was taken private off the London Stock Exchange in 2022 in a deal valuing it near £810 million, and since October 2025 its ultimate parent has been Rothermere Continuation Holdings Ltd, a company domiciled in Jersey (Press Gazette; PE Insights). A dual-class share structure keeps voting power with the family even though they hold a minority of the economic shares — the same mechanism that keeps the Murdochs atop News Corp and the Sulzbergers atop the New York Times. The stable also includes the Mail on Sunday, Metro and the i. * The family's editorial fingerprints go back a long way, and not always to a flattering place. On January 15, 1934, the Daily Mail ran "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!" — an article written by the 1st Viscount Rothermere, an ancestor of the current owner, openly backing Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and urging young men to join (The Spectator archive, Jan 1934). Rothermere admired Mussolini and Hitler; his support for Mosley faded within months, reportedly once advertisers took fright. It is history, not today's newsroom — but it is exactly why "who owns the Mail, and what have they used it for" is a fair question and not a cheap shot. * In practice the modern Mail is two things at once: a right-leaning, pro-Conservative, pro-Brexit editorial voice in print, and MailOnline — one of the most-read English-language news websites on earth, a firehose of celebrity, crime and "sidebar of shame" traffic that runs somewhat separately from the paper. It breaks real stories and wins press awards; it also collects press-regulator rulings. "Reliable" is the wrong single label. High-volume, agenda-driven, and to be read with the sourcing checked — that is closer to the truth. * On our least-biased-news ranking we grade outlets by who owns them and how openly they own it, and the Mail is refreshingly un-mysterious on that score: one family, five generations, a Jersey holding company, and no pretense of neutrality. Read it for the scoop, verify before you share, and remember that a single family has been deciding what the Daily Mail says since 1896.