UK · Bias: Left-populist
Reach plc
The Daily Mirror is the historic tabloid of the British working class and the Labour movement — the anti-Sun, sitting on the same supermarket shelf. Founded in 1903, it peaked as the world's best-selling daily in the 1960s and remains the only red-top reliably left of centre. Its owner, Reach plc, also runs the Express and hundreds of local titles on a shrinking-budget treadmill, and spent years paying out for the industrial-scale phone hacking of the 2000s — Prince Harry personally won a hacking case against Mirror Group in court in 2023.
In May 2004, editor Piers Morgan splashed photos of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner. Within two weeks the Army demonstrated the photos were staged fakes — the truck in them had never left England. Morgan refused to apologize, insisting the photos illustrated a truth even if they weren't one. The board fired him the same day, and he was escorted out of the building. It endures as British journalism's cleanest lesson in why 'fake but accurate' is not a defense — and it launched Morgan's second career of being loudly wrong on television.