My attention was drawn to a recent news story, which reported that bullying can be good for children. Oh, really? Assuming for a moment that the Daily Fail story was accurately representing the results of the research, I drew a very different conclusion from the one in the headline (and URL). A study has shown that youngsters are more popular and more admired by teachers and friends if they return schoolyard hostility in kind.
Background: Richard Desmond is the owner of the Daily Express, and publisher of many of Britain’s finest (?) porn magazines. The Daily Express has just switched political allegiance, and is now backing the Conservative Party under Michael Howard. Desmond wanted to buy the Daily Telegraph, but the price he was quoted was too high. In the mean time, the German Axel Springer publishing group has put in a bid for the Telegraph.
On the plane home, there was only one British paper to choose from—the Daily Mail. XQ had taken a copy of the Mail with her when she left for Germany; she had wanted to be able to show the German kids what a British tabloid newspaper was like, but had been too embarrassed to buy The Sun. As luck would have it, that day the Mail had had a two-page spread by Paul ‘Why oh why” Johnson, entitled “What if we had made peace with Hitler?